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SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



SOCIALIZING THE 
THREE R'S 



BY 

RUTH MARY WEEKS 

AUTHOR OF 

THE people's school: a study in 

VOCATIONAL TEAINING 



Neto g0rk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1919 

All rights raerved 






Copyright, 1919, 

bt the maomillan company. 



Set up and elcctrotyped. Published July, 1919. 



JUL -5 1919 



WottonoU ^tess 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Maas., U.S.A. 



(0)Ci.A529113 



c 






TO THE 

HEROIC PEOPLE OF BELGIUM 

WHO DIED 

THAT DEMOCRACY MIGHT LIVE 

THIS LITTLE BOOK 

ON DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 

IS GRATEFULLY 

DEDICATED 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 



page: 



I. The Growing Point in Modern Education . 1 

II. The World To-day 10 

1. Culture in America 10 

2. Politics 19 

3. Industry 22 

4. Nationalism and International Policy . . 30 

5. Preparation for Social Citizenship ... 44 

III. Reading and Writing 52 

IV. Social Arithmetic 86 

V. History 103 

VI. Art for Little Folks 114 

VII. General Science 123 

VIII. Manual Training 128 

IX. SocL^L Play . 134 

X. SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS .... 149 

XI. Conclusion 163 

Apfendices 167 



vu 



SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 



THE GROWING POINT IN MODERN 
EDUCATION 

The last twenty-five years have seen a greater 
improvement in the cahber and training of American 
teachers than in the personnel of any other learned 
profession ; and the fact that this has come in spite of 
extraordinary expansion of public school facilities and 
consequent rapid growth in the demand for teachers 
is a striking proof of the energy and esprit de corps 
of the pedagogic body, and of the increasing at- 
traction of this calling for public-spirited men and 
women. Never before have professional standards 
been so high; the humblest college instructor must 
show his Ph.D. in the catalogue; high school po- 
sitions can scarcely be had without a degree from 
some first-class university, and a multiplicity of corre- 
spondence and summer courses, together with more 
freely granted leaves of absence, encourage instruc- 
tors to even further work along their chosen lines ; 
vocational branches are taught more and more by 
trained experts ; except in the most backward rural 
districts, a normal diploma in addition to high school 



2 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

credit is required of all grade school teachers ; stu- 
dents in kindergarten training schools are drawn 
from the best high school and even college material ; 
and constant checking up of methods and results by 
trained supervisors and efficiency experts keeps the 
city teacher, at least, on his mettle and energetically 
employing the whole of his new professional re- 
sources. 

Educational ideas too have undergone in the last 
twenty -five years an equally impressive revolution. 
First came the kindergarten with its study of child 
nature and its profound influence on teaching 
methods from grade school to university; next 
manual training with its emphasis on the all-round 
development of personality; then so-called practi- 
cal courses like bookkeeping, millinery, and cooking, 
with their recognition of the duty of education to 
prepare for self-supporting life; then out and out 
vocational education and vocational guidance ; and 
now the Gary, Montessori, and Dewey systems of 
administration, making of the school itself a world 
in miniature. Never have subjects been so well 
and attractively taught in their respective class- 
rooms ; never has the trend of educational thought 
been so progressive, so practical, so close to daily 
needs. 

And it is fortunate that this is so; for never before 
has the task confronting the public school system 
of a nation been so complex, so vital, so stupendous 
as it is in America to-day. Never has any teaching 
body stood so much in need of skill and vision, of 



GROWING POINT IN MODERN EDUCATION 3 

technique and imagination, of factual knowledge, 
and of social ideals. Not only is the mechanism of 
modern life far more complicated than that for which 
our educational schedule was originally drafted, but 
culturally, religiously, politically, and industrially, 
America like all the world is facing a readjustment 
of forces and ideals ; and to America the nations 
look for the democratic program on which the coming 
years can rear the structure of a liberal and harmo- 
nious international life. To contribute to this pro- 
gram, to tune the mind and heart of future gener- 
ations to this readjustment — such is the problem 
of our public schools. And it is to an analysis of 
this great task in relation to the specific subjects of 
grade school study that the chapters in this book 
will be devoted, in the hope of formulating a point 
of view toward the whole matter of schooling that 
may revitalize and suggest new manipulations of 
that material which has never been so well known 
and taught by American teachers as it is known and 
taught to-day, yet which must be readapted to meet 
the unsolved problems not only in our national life 
but in the wider international world in which we 
soon must play a leading role. 

There is no topic about which pedagogues hear 
more — and in spite of our progressiveness, think 
less — than this same function of the school system 
as a whole. We are told that we are training the 
men and women of to-morrow, that in our hands 
lies the destiny of a nation; and we hear numerous 
exhortations to equip for life the rising generation. 



4 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

But practical definition of this life for which we are 
to prepare the new generation does not fall so often 
from the lips of our advisors or shape itself so clearly 
to our view. 

If not sure enough, still we are comfortably sure 
of our arithmetic, geography, history, and the rest ; 
our normal schools have taught us that, together 
with ingenious devices for insinuating such matters 
into the unwary brain of youth. We are sure, if 
not sure enough, of child psychology, for we have 
studied the child's interests and mental processes, 
and learned how to make of school a vital and fas- 
cinating factor in his experience. But how clearly 
do we teachers understand the social, political, and 
industrial organization of the world for whose per- 
fecting we are preparing the pupils in our common 
schools ? And what scientific analysis have we so 
far made of the duties, responsibilities, and op- 
portunities of the adult American life of which 
the child must one day form a part ? Certain 
fundamental functions of the individual suggest 
themselves readily enough for consideration — self- 
support, self-cultivation, marriage, parenthood, citi- 
zenship, and the employment of leisure — but what in 
America to-day does each of these terms mean ? and 
how can actual classroom instruction, while keeping 
hold of childish interests, connect with and prepare 
for these duties, responsibilities, and opportunities ? 
That is a question to which we are not so ready to 
reply. Yet we are on the brink of a vast educa- 
tional readaptation to life, a vast socialization of in- 



GROWING POINT IN MODERN EDUCATION 5 

struction to meet the new complexities of our national 
and international affairs, and the successful teacher 
of to-morrow will be the teacher who can answer that 
question and apply the answer to his curriculum. 
For the teaching of to-morrow will be done not, as 
too often heretofore, in the artificial vacuum of 
schoolroom atmosphere, but in the open air of life; 
normal training schools will begin their study not 
with the special subjects which their graduates must 
some day teach, not with methods, not even with 
child nature, but with a solid foundation of biology, 
history, economics, and sociology — sciences which 
explain the origin and nature of the world we know, 
in what respects it is satisfactory, and in accordance 
with what laws of growth we must work in order to 
shape and accelerate its progress ; every teacher will 
work from a clearly formulated social and economic 
philosophy ; and the pivotal and central fact in public 
schooling will be at last a social ideal. 

Since the publication nearly twenty years ago of 
John Dewey's epoch-making little volume. School and 
Society, pedagogues have recognized that formal edu- 
cation to be effective must adjust itself to the outside 
world. Vocational education and vocational guid- 
ance are a long stride toward linking school and life 
and making education at once prepare for and affect 
the world of practical affairs. But too often this 
adjustment has been only piecemeal, a link here and 
there between certain details of school and life or 
between certain departments of instruction or even 
whole schools and some single aspect of social activ- 



6 SOCIALIZING THE THREE WS 

ity. Herein lies the weakness of exclusively voca- 
tional schools directed solely to the creation of wage- 
earning power in special professional, commercial, or 
industrial lines. And herein lies the weakness of 
much intelligent endeavor to illustrate instruction 
from the outside world and to take up in class dis- 
cussion definite topics of public interest. All these 
gropings toward unification of school and life fall 
short of that socialization which goes to the root of 
aim and method ; infuses into ground plan and trivial 
detail of education the spirit of constructive sociol- 
ogy ; and sets in the heart of every teacher the ques- 
tion not simply '*How can I best teach this child to 
read, write, and calculate ?" but "How can I best fit 
him to survive in the world we know and also to 
help bring to pass the better world of which we 
dream?" Here is the growing point of education; 
here the direction of its future progress ; here the 
line beyond which we most need to widen our horizon 
and reach out for new methods and ideals. For too 
often in the past, school training has been not only 
formal and academic, but largely selfish as well, 
setting a premium on individual acquisitiveness 
rather than group cooperation. Social interests, 
social habits, social ideals are not the stuff of which 
the average recitation is composed ; and still less is 
the average classroom recitation planned to be a 
part in any comprehensive scheme of social better- 
ment. 

But with the entry of the United States into the 
War has come a great resurgence of the civic sense of 



GROWING POINT IN MODERN EDUCATION 7 

educational agencies. This consciousness has so far 
been in the main directed toward the obviously 
patriotic and military types of national service : 
enlistment in the army, military training, purchase 
of Liberty Bonds, and Red Cross and relief work of 
various kinds. But such wholesome civic spirit will 
find a broader and more permanent expression. 
"The War," writes our great American school mas- 
ter, President Wilson, in his appeal to American 
school officers, "The War is bringing to the minds of 
our people a new appreciation of the problems of 
national life and a deeper understanding of the mean- 
ing and aims of democracy. Matters which here- 
tofore have seemed commonplace and trivial are 
seen in a truer light. The urgent demand for the 
production and proper distribution of food and other 
national resources has made us aware of the close 
dependence of individual on individual and nation 
on nation. The efforts to keep up social and indus- 
trial organizations in spite of the withdrawal of 
men for the army have revealed the extent to which 
modern life has become complex and specialized. 

"These and other lessons of the War must be 
learned quickly if we are intelligently and success- 
fully to defend our institutions. When the War is 
over, we must apply the wisdom which we have 
acquired, in purging and ennobling the life of the 
world. 

"In these vital tasks of acquiring a broader view 
of human possibilities, the common school must 
have a large part. I urge that teachers and other 



8 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

school officers increase materially the time and atten- 
tion devoted to instruction bearing directly on the 
problems of community and national life. 

"Such a plea is in no way foreign to the spirit of 
American education or of existing practices. Nor is 
it a plea for a temporary enlargement of the school 
program appropriate merely to the period of the War. 
It is a plea for a realization in public education of 
the new emphasis which the War has given to the 
ideals of democracy and to the broader conceptions 
of national life." 

Let us then ask what specifically these ideals are ; 
how they are manifested in the cultural, political, 
and industrial life of our United States; what are 
the obstacles to their full realization ; and how 
school systems can contribute to their fruition in 
national efficiency and the international organiza- 
tion of a democratic world. The head of a great 
social settlement once said of the even greater 
grammar school across the street, "We cannot coop- 
erate with the school ; it has no social ideal." Yet if 
the teacher knows and understands the world and 
its problems, formulates a plan for human progress 
in harmony with the trend of evolution, works out 
the relation of his special subject to this plan, and 
so presents it as to prepare the pupil for his special 
destiny, teaching is the most fundamental, far- 
reaching, permanent, and constructive social service. 
The splendid response of our country to the call of 
humanity in this present war, the strides which the 
United States, all unprepared, has made in two short 



GROWING POINT IN MODERN EDUCATION 9 

years, the stupendous character of her military un- 
dertakings, attest the fact that in the past her 
pubHc schools have done their duty well. But a 
new future lies before us, bringing to our educational 
system new problems and responsibilities. To solve 
these problems and shoulder these responsibilities, 
what then do we teachers need to know about the 
world to-day ? What relation do the subjects of 
grade school study bear to social progress ? And 
how shall we teach them to extract their greatest 
social value ? 



II 

THE WORLD TO-DAY 

In the space of this short study, a complete and 
scientific sociological basis for modern education can 
scarcely be erected. We can take at best but a 
sweeping glance at the outstanding features of the 
American world by and for which we must shape 
our program. Yet some such preliminary survey, 
inadequate though it be, is necessary to give us 
landmarks for our discussion and to point out the 
paths along which childhood can be led through 
reading, writing, arithmetic, history, games, art, 
science, and manual training into a clearer under- 
standing of the world which soon will be for better or 
for worse, the stuff and partner of its destiny. 

1 

Culture in America 

Far more striking for some years past than even 
our strident and overadvertised materialism, has 
been the rapidly widening circle of culture and 
education in the United States. 

Vast numbers of people, for instance, are to-day 
forming the habit of reading who till recently either 
did not read at all or else read slowly and painfully, 

10 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 11 

spelling out syllable by syllable the evening paper or 
an infrequent letter. The trashy novels, cheap maga- 
zines, and yellow journals which convince some 
critics that literature is going to the dogs, are really 
a hopeful sign. They do not complicate the task of 
reading by any difficulty in understanding their sub- 
stance, and thus they train persons to like to read for 
whom the sheer physical difficulty of rapid reading 
had been an insuperable barrier to enjoyment. 
From the cheap novel and flashy journal, such 
persons graduate, not into Thackeray and Jane 
Austen, to be sure, but into substantial periodi- 
cals like The World's Work and the good news- 
papers, and a new reading public accessible to 
ideas and information is created. In the school, 
too, the application to the teaching of reading of 
new methods based on such scientific study of the 
reading process as that conducted at the Chicago 
School of Education,^ tends toward the same end. 
Pupils who formerly left school able to read but still 
for all practical purposes nonreaders, under the 
new regime overcome their difficulties and learn the 
joy that comes with rapidity and power. 

People who never went to the theater before are 
flocking to moving picture shows, and the movies 
do not mean deterioration of theatrical taste but the 
awakening of dramatic interest in a vast new au- 

1. See University of Chicago Press publications : Studies of Elementary 
School Reading by W. S. Gray, An Experimental Study in the Psychology 
of Reading by W. A. Schmidt, Types of Reading Ability by C. T. Gray, 
and Reading; Its Nature and Development by C. H. Judd. 



n SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

dience which the American theater of the future will 
have to draw upon. People once ignorant of music 
are playing the pianola and victrola ; and while it is 
all too true that these devices produce lazy man's 
music and are only one more symptom of a growing 
tendency on the part of the public to seek entertain- 
ment from without instead of engaging in creative 
play, still free concerts and "canned music" are 
gradually leading the average family away from 
"There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night" 
to something really sweet and fine in musical enjoy- 
ment. Cheap productions of great paintings and 
sculpture, the rising standard of book and news- 
paper illustrations, the opening of galleries in the 
smaller cities throughout the United States, all these 
agencies gradually interest new people in the world 
of art. Every cottage has its chromo on the wall, 
perhaps hideous in itself but herald of better things, 
sign of a dawning instinct for the decorative and 
expressive side of life. 

The force of this widening circle of culture is felt 
in the realm of education. High school teachers and 
even college professors often complain that the qual- 
ity of their pupils is deteriorating, but the real fact 
is that a sort of people are going through ward 
school, through high school, even on to college, who 
never before have gone to school. There are just as 
man,y cultivated pupils with a home background of 
refined tastes, but they seem few beside the hordes 
who are suddenly beginning to feel the need of educa- 
tion and culture without having any real taste or 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 13 

liking for it at the start. This situation contains an 
obvious and wonderful opportunity and a less obvious 
but overwhelming problem. The teacher is con- 
fronted by the well-nigh unanswerable question of to 
whom her teaching shall be directed ? Shall it be 
directed to the pupils with better advantages and 
more cultivated perceptions, or shall standards be 
lowered to the level of the inrushing Goths and 
Vandals ? Of course practically the teacher has to 
compromise with the comparatively low cultural 
standards of this vast new public which is coming up 
to the halls of learning for the first time. She is 
swamped. The Goths triumph by sheer numbers. 
She may even be a Goth herself, for they have car- 
ried the stronghold of diplomas and invaded every 
profession. 

To illustrate what such a triumph of the lower 
average means, let me describe a trivial experiment 
I have made with high school and college students 
for the last five or six years. It is my practice to ask 
each of my classes what is their idea of a real gentle- 
man. I find that almost without exception they 
entertain a strong prejudice against finish in speech 
and manner, their preference being for the rough 
diamond who may not know how to choose his forks 
at a dinner but who has a true heart. This is, I fear, 
neither a reaction against artificiality nor even the 
by-product of current shirt-sleeve fiction, but the 
dislike usually felt by inferiority for what reminds it 
of its limitations. In the face of this overwhelming 
prejudice, any pupil who has naturally finished man- 



14 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

ners and educated tastes will hide them. Children 
dread the judgment of their contemporaries. Your 
own little boy, if set down among the street arabs of 
New York, would painfully acquire their jargon so 
as not to be peculiar. Popular education does just 
this in a modified form to that minority of our pupils 
who come from cultivated families. If the teacher 
follows the general lead in her instruction, by com- 
promising with the majority, she deprives the average 
pupils of the stimulus of a higher standard, and the 
more fortunate pupils of the chance to start from 
where they already are and forge ahead. 

But we are confronted in our classrooms not only 
with different cultural levels but with widely varying 
individual ability. Shall we set our teaching-pace 
by the brighter or the slower pupils and to which 
shall we devote that scanty individual attention 
which a crowded class permits ? Although it is 
obvious that the bright child has the greater social 
value, it is usually said that the clever ones can get 
along alone; that the instructor should put his 
extra time where it is needed most; and that the 
ability of the average must set the pace. This is 
like giving the right of way to the freight train and 
not the flyer ; and indeed ordinary public education 
does force the flyers to crawl along behind the slow 
coaches or derail and try to bump past unguided in 
the ditch. As some educator has remarked, most of 
us come nearer doing all that can be done for our 
average than for our better pupils. Our really 
gifted students remain largely untaught; and our 



THE WORLD TODAY 15 

only provision for their superaverage capacity is 
the illogical makeshift of skipping grades. 

There are many ways in which the present school 
system aggravates this cultural and intellectual 
tyranny of the average. Educational pioneers have 
at last discovered that grammar school, high school, 
and even university classes should be sifted and 
graded so that students of similar power and prepa- 
ration can progress together at a reasonably uniform 
rate; yet in most cities, large scale education still 
means the old • overflowing ungraded classes with 
fixed courses adapted to the greatest number. Man- 
ual training and art teachers have fared better than 
the rest in this regard since individual instruction is 
so obviously necessary in these branches, but there 
is a growing tendency to crowd easels and benches 
even here to the full room capacity as the demand 
for education increases faster than the buildings. 

The mediocrity of too many teachers also helps to 
level down instruction. Edward A. Ross in dis- 
cussing education as one of the powerful factors in 
social control, speaks of the great gain in the partial 
substitution of the teacher for the parent as the 
model upon which the child forms itself. "Copy 
the child will, and the advantage of giving him his 
teacher instead of his father to imitate is that the 
teacher is a picked person and the father is not." 
Consider then the loss if the teacher be not a picked 
person, picked not merely in the sense of knowing 
something the child does not know and having the 
gift of imparting that knowledge; but picked in 



16 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

being one whose view of life, whose tastes, whose 
instinctive preferences, whose superficial manners 
and whose ideals are superior to those of the homes 
from which the children come. 

Yet the matter of mere knowledge is not one to 
overlook in a quest for personal requirements since 
information underlies any substantial culture or 
successful teaching. A recent survey of the prepara- 
tion of grade and high school instructors in a west- 
ern state revealed the startling fact that in spite of 
the required college or normal school diploma, 
teachers in that commonwealth were still inade- 
quately equipped since in surprisingly few cases 
were they engaged in the work on which they had 
specialized in college. What they knew about their 
present subjects was largely at the expense of the 
pupils who had passed through their hands. The 
grade school, the high school, and sometimes even 
the freshman year of college become in such a case a 
sort of unsupervised training school for teaching 
specialists and the students serve as unwitting 
practice classes. 

The result is vicious for both master and pupil, 
for when the young and poorly prepared instructor, 
only a little way ahead of his students, attempts 
to present, for instance, great poetry which is 
beyond their full and ready grasp, it is all too 
easy to vulgarize the subject instead of getting 
the pupil imaginatively aroused and dragging him 
to the level of the theme in hand. Students in 
advanced university courses often manifest a stolid 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 17 

self-satisfaction, lack of imagination, and incapacity 
to appreciate the beyond-themselves-ness of what 
they study, an incapacity to rise to it, expand with 
it and enter into it with dignity, which comes partly 
from lack of home advantages, but also in part from 
prolonged contact with immature instructors who 
have not made themselves at home with culture, 
and who in the press of teaching, never grow beyond 
the elementary aspects of things which the intel- 
ligent student could discover for himself. Thus the 
pupil comes to think there is nothing in a subject 
except what he can see without much effort. 

The teacher who gives real impetus to learning and 
thinking, is a scholar and a pedagogue as well. It is 
the weighty factual equipment which gives general- 
ization and appreciation their force and truth and 
liveliness. Every mind cannot carry the weight 
of exhaustive knowledge and still keep the general 
view; but that proves not that scientific scholar- 
ship is undesirable in a teacher, but that such per- 
sons do not belong in the profession. The real 
teacher is one who, having mastered the factual details 
without which enthusiasm is mere air treading, can 
hold them in the hollow of his hand and use them as 
the stuff for a large imaginative presentation. For 
example, the only person who can make past litera- 
ture vital to our day is the person who knows how it 
was vital in its own, for he alone knows what it is. 
The history — economic, social, political, religious, 
and artistic — out of which it grew, the foreign in- 
fluences that played upon and paralleled it, all this 



18 SOCIALIZING THE THREE WS 

is necessary to understanding present growth and 
change, to getting below present surface phenomena 
to where the cumulative forces of past and present 
are at work. If we believe in evolution, we must 
wish to be ourselves "on the Lord's side," to act 
consciously with the forward-going forces. And how 
act with them till by a study of the course of human 
progress, we distinguish what they are ? Deep, ripe, 
and exhaustive scholarship, then, is essential to the 
teaching of any branch of any subject from primer 
grade to university. It must at this point be ad- 
mitted, however, that our colleges and universities 
have not yet successfully combined training in 
scholarship with training in grade or high school 
teaching methods. But that scholarship is soon to 
be demanded of all who seek teaching positions is 
obvious to those who watch the choice of teachers 
in all departments of up-to date school systems. 
And the absence of such scholarship on the part of 
many gifted and intelligent instructors has been the 
ball and chain which still shortens each forward 
stride in education. 

The subservience of our state universities and 
normal schools to political domination is another 
important factor in keeping the pace, at least of 
higher education, well within the average rate. At 
this present writing, the governor of a great south- 
western commonwealth has suddenly cut off supplies 
from its new university, deeming the common school 
in which he got his only education sufficient for 
state welfare, and all further culture — liberal or 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 19 

scientific — an idle waste of public revenue. The 
case is flagrant and extreme yet one of the great 
problems of American education, as indeed of every 
department of American life, is overcoming just this 
tyranny of the average, and saving the best culture 
of our land from stifling beneath the stodgy and self- 
satisfied perfection of the commonplace. But this 
is only the reverse side of an amazing and splendid 
spectacle, a rising average, a more rapid widening 
of the circle of culture and education than has been 
witnessed in any age by any other civilization. 

Politics 

In political life, the same phenomenon appears. 
A sort of people are voting in America who never 
before in the history of the world have shared in the 
government of any country. The results are apparent 
in governmental clumsiness and inefficiency ; but those 
persons who criticize our government for its bungling, 
often forget the counterbalancing value of the ballot 
as an educative force. There are two conceptions 
of government : first, that it is a machine to get done 
certain necessary public business ; second (and this 
is the democratic view), that popular government is 
a means of raising the level of social conscience and 
intelligence by bringing the people into direct con- 
tact with public issues. Our democratic suffrage is 
a great popular university — unfortunately not as 
yet coeducational, for while many claims made for 



20 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

woman suffrage are extravagant, the ballot cannot 
fail to be a liberal education to women. This view 
of government does not mean, however, that we 
should put up with an inefficient administration 
forever just because it may seem representative. 
Government must keep pace with the actual level 
of rising public intelligence, as it has not always done, 
although commission and city manager schemes are 
efforts to make administration both efficient and 
democratic. But the essence of our American ex- 
periment is that we should be patient with a certain 
amount of clumsiness while the public learns by 
doing. 

And learning we are to an extent even greater 
than is indicated by a liberal suffrage, for suffrage 
itself is becoming much more educative as govern- 
ment changes its character and grows more and 
more complex and comprehensive. Not so very 
long ago, governments existed to protect the nation 
from within and without by police and military 
power and to collect taxes for the support of these de- 
fensive agencies. We are now in the throes of a 
great struggle which has raised this vestigial gov- 
ernmental object to a temporary position of para- 
mount importance. But for the modern world, 
this is an abnormal situation, precipitated by a 
people out of step with international progress. In 
years of peace, defense, though essential, is insignifi- 
cant beside the great constructive social activity of 
the state. Life and limb, health, morals, happiness, 
wealth and comfort, education, culture and the arts. 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 21 

science, industry and agriculture, housing, city 
planning, recreation ; the whole intricate machinery 
of daily living, eating, sleeping, and going abroad 
to work and play ; all these occupy the attention of 
department after department, official after official of 
our city, state, and national administrations, and it 
is to the direction and improvement of these various 
phases of national life that the revenues of taxation 
are normally directed. 

This new emphasis in government, manifest in the 
conduct of every unit from village to nation, is 
made far more significant by the increasing tendency 
of American legislation to be direct instead of in- 
direct and representative. Laws are the steps up 
which we climb toward what we have glimpsed but 
not yet surely reached. Men progress from bondage 
to freedom not by overthrowing but by becoming the 
law, by making the guiding principle a part of their 
own nature and not an outward formal restriction 
upon conduct. Any law is in its existence and en- 
forcement an educative fact, but the initiative and 
referendum put the citizen to school for life, espe- 
cially when exerted over the wide topical area now 
included within the field of legislation. The multi- 
farious departments of local and federal government 
deal with subjects upon which the average voter 
has scarcely thought till called upon to elect candi- 
dates for office. The bills introduced into city 
councils and state legislatures concern questions new 
to the average popular representative. Government 
more and more opens the eye of the officeholder to 



22 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

the essential solidarity of humanity ; exerts upon all 
who move in the political arena a more and more 
liberalizing and stimulating influence; demands of 
public servants and voters alike a greater and greater 
degree of vision, intelligence, and efficiency. And 
now more than ever in America will this be true as 
the political horizon of our country widens to include 
international as well as national issues. The voter of 
to-morrow, by simply attaining his majority, becomes 
an arbiter of fate for men across the sea who until to- 
day never seemed to move upon the same life current 
as himself ; of whom he knows and understands little ; 
yet whom he must know and understand if inter- 
national peace and cooperation are to be more than a 
poet's dream. 



Industry 

And what is the status of our industrial world 
to-day ? Extreme specialization in processes and 
occupations ; a resulting decay in apprenticeship 
which necessitates school provision for vocational 
education; centralization of industrial control; and 
intricate and absolute interdependence of the whole 
fabric of productive activity — these are the well- 
known hall marks of our modern industrial organiza- 
tion. But there are two changes in this familiar 
system which we must learn to anticipate ; of which, 
in fact, the signs are rife : the socialization of produc- 
tion to a much larger extent than we have been accus- 
tomed to expect, and the democratizing of industry 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 23 

as the workers themselves share more and more in 
the direction of business. As evidence of the social- 
ization of production, I need mention only municipal 
ownership of public utilities, streets, water power, 
light, gas, electricity, transit and heating systems ; 
and national ownership of natural resources, the post 
office, the parcels post, and perhaps of the railways 
and a merchant marine. Moreover, minimum wage 
laws, working men's compensation acts, laws gov- 
erning the hours of labor — in fact all government 
regulation of industries, whether state or national, 
is a very positive semisocialization. We are living 
under a progressively socialized system of production 
where the general public as voters exercise more and 
more supervision over the conduct of business if 
they do not actually conduct publicly owned busi- 
ness enterprises. And if other socializing forces had 
been lacking, the War would have written the death 
sentence of individualistic business method ; for the 
sudden vast centralization of transportation, com- 
merce, agriculture, and industry in this country and 
abroad and their common direction toward a public 
purpose which have arisen as a war economy, must 
remain in part at its close as the natural and efficient 
productive system of a social world. 

Mr. Louis Brandeis, during his testimony before 
the Commission on Industrial Relations as to the 
causes of industrial unrest, voiced an interesting 
opinion concerning the democratizing of industry by 
giving the workers themselves a share in the direc- 
tion of business. "My observation leads me to 



24 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

believe that while there are many causes contributing 
to unrest, there is one cause which is fundamental, 
and that is the conflict between our political liberty 
and our industrial absolutism." Mr. Brandeis goes 
on to show how while every man supposedly has his 
voice in the government, industry has been a state 
within a state, an absolutism within a democracy, 
an absolutism in which the worker has no vote. 
This absolutism may be very benevolent, but still 
the worker has no voice in determining the condi- 
tions under which he works, the wages he gets, or the 
general conduct of the business. "These problems," 
he says, "are not purely the employers' problems. 
They are the problems of the trade — of both em- 
ployer and employee. No mere liberality in the 
division of the proceeds of industry can meet this 
situation. There must be a division not only of 
the profits, but a division of the responsibilities; 
and the men must have the opportunity of deciding 
in part what shall be their condition and how the 
business shall be run. They also as a part of that 
responsibility, must learn that they must hear the fatal 
results of mistakes, just as the employers do. Unless 
we establish an industrial democracy, unrest will 
not only continue, but in my opinion will grow 
worse." These are not the words of a radical and 
an agitator, but the utterance of a man who has a life 
job in the most conservative corporation in the United 
States, our real governing body, the Supreme Court.^ 

* See similar statement of federal commission to investigate shipyard 
labor troubles and I. W. W. activities in mines and lumber fields. 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 25 

Side by side with brutal outgrowths of industrial 
tyranny like the recent race riots of East St. Louis, 
there is abundant evidence that the industrial 
democracy of which Judge Brandeis spoke is on 
the way. The fact is recognized even in capitalistic 
strongholds. Examples of profit sharing, too numer- 
ous to mention, very frankly admit the rights of 
workers to be larger than we had supposed. There 
are businesses where a representative of labor sits 
on the board of directors. One reads of the estab- 
lishment of numerous cooperative enterprises, espe- 
cially on the Pacific coast. The Federal War Labor 
Board has already stated in its program and the 
Congress of the United States has written into the 
1918 Man Power Bill the proposition that, for the 
period of the War at least, employers shall bargain 
collectively with their employees ; that in case of 
failure to reach a mutual agreement, differences 
must be settled collectively through the Federal 
War Labor Board ; and that failure thus to bargain 
or submit unsettled differences shall automatically 
waive all draft claims of either employer or employee 
for exemption based on supposed industrial service 
to the government in her hour of need. As a meas- 
ure of war efficiency, the government of the United 
States has established the principle of industrial 
democracy. And last but most significant, even 
before the War, the power of organized labor in de- 
termining business policy through collective bar- 
gaining and through the exertion of such political 
influence as secured the passage of the Adamson 



^6 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

Act, is proof positive that whether we like it or not, a 
new element is entering into the industrial councils 
of the nation. Just as politics and education are 
feeling the new democratic influx, so industry must 
anticipate and prepare for the same readjustment. 
That this industrial readjustment will be slow and 
diflScult is easy to foresee, perhaps even more difficult 
than the political struggle for representative govern- 
ment and popular suffrage, extending through the 
centuries and punctuated by such bloody crises as 
the French, the Mexican, and the Russian revolu- 
tions. The mutual attitude of the two parties to 
the industrial contest is not suggestive of ready 
compromise and conciliation. A writer, in a current 
weekly, strikingly pictures the limitations in the 
democratic vision of our capitalistic class and all 
those whose interests and ideas lie upon the capital- 
ist's side. "A man acquainted with political affairs 
who will spend three months in Washington meeting 
business men coming on war business to the national 
capital from all parts of the United States would 
find it difficult not to conclude that American busi- 
ness men, all in all, in spite of their splendid patriot- 
ism, are the most reactionary class of industrial 
rulers in the civilized world. For an astonishing 
number of them, the whole labor movement, which 
has given us trade union governments in the Antip- 
odes, cabinets speckled with Socialists in virtually 
every free country in Europe, and a labor man as 
prime minister of England, is not a movement at 
all. It is nothing but a 'trouble.' The very demo- 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 27 

cratic impulse that is shaking and remaking the 
world, thrusts a finger in their factories, and they 
see nothing but * labor trouble' invented by outside 
agitators." 

This is natural and explainable enough. The 
average business owner or manager still thinks of 
his business as peculiarly and privately his own. 
Let a strike occur in his factory : nine times out of 
ten he would grant the demands of the strikers if 
that did not involve dealing with a trade union; 
nine times out of ten he is a kind-hearted and gen- 
erous person who would put his hand in his pocket 
quickly enough to help a worker in distress if only 
the distress came vividly to his attention in an acci- 
dental way. But he will waste money in a losing 
fight, close his factory, call in troops or hired police, 
risk the shedding of blood, refuse all the appeals of 
common humanity, close his mind to logic, self- 
interest, or friendly persuasion simply because, as 
he puts it, he will have no one dictating to him how to 
run his business. His business : in those two words 
lies the root of trouble, the key to his state of mind. 
There is nothing remarkable or inhuman in all this, 
however socially awkward the results may be. For 
centuries, law has existed for the protection of 
propertied interests ; money and privilege have been 
the way to ownership ; labor has been regarded 
solely as a commodity to be bought and sold in the 
cheapest market. Naturally, the man who has 
put the original money into an enterprise thinks he 
owns the business ; the managers whom he had dele- 



28 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

gated think of the business as his and theirs to 
govern as they choose. The idea that it may also 
be the business of the clerks and operators who toil 
in its offices and factories is alien to their way of 
thought. Yet these others too put into the con- 
cern their work, their brains, their time, their inter- 
est, their whole productive energy. They too de- 
pend upon its conduct for the whole fabric of their 
lives, depend on it, in fact, much more completely 
than the owner, who probably will have other inter- 
ests and resources. In a terribly vital sense, it is 
their business, into which they put their all; from 
which they receive their all. Yet this fact there has 
been little in life, in law, or in education to make 
the owner understand. He begins to see that his 
factory is in some occult way the business of the 
government; grudgingly or ungrudgingly, he com- 
plies with legal standards of hours, pay, safety, and 
sanitation. But that it is the business of his em- 
ployees as well, he cannot feel. If you would un- 
derstand the spiritual tragedy of King John sign- 
ing the Magna Charta, of a Tsar creating a Duma, 
or of the House of Lords yielding their veto, study 
a business man in the throes of a successful strike. 
There is a pathos in conscientious reactionism which 
we often overlook. 

Yet gaze now at the other side of the same picture. 
The summer of 1916 witnessed the passage of the 
Adamson Act, whose provisions most men will sanc- 
tion yet whose method of passage many will deplore. 
Refusing to arbitrate, wielding its new-found power 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 29 

of organization, labor fell back upon the stone age 
argument of force and compelled the passage of 
the measure. It is easy to see where labor learned 
to use this method. For centuries capital has 
manipulated government and legislation for its own 
ends ; and it is not strange that now that labor has 
at length the power, labor should follow suit! In 
Russia to-day, we see the frank expression of serf 
and wage slave philosophy. The worker would 
take over industry; the peasant would take over 
landed estates. To the syndicalist, the maximalist, 
the direct actionist, all industry is as emphatically 
the property of the workers as, to the capitalist, it 
is the property of the owner. Invested capital, 
enterprise, business imagination, the creative idea 
are nothing ! Labor is all : labor creates ownership. 
And the bitterness of the proletariat is no less black 
and stubborn than that of capital. On the one hand, 
the blindness of long and undisturbed possession ; 
on the other, the blindness born of age-long injustice 
and oppression. Here is the situation which Gals- 
worthy has drawn so sympathetically for England 
in his early play of Strife. Here is the situation 
which produced the industrial ferment of the first 
few months of American participation in the War, 
months when labor feared that the United States, 
repeating the now rectified mistakes of England, 
would in the name of patriotism take from labor its 
new and hard- won standards of hours, work, and 
pay. Here is the situation into which as formers of 
an internal policy, we are sending year by year the 



30 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

products of our public schools. And here is a sit- 
uation which it behooves the public school teachers 
to study, with prejudice against neither side and 
with sympathy for both, in order to determine the 
subtle psychological causes which make of indus- 
trial readjustment so thorny and steep a path ; in 
order to remove the barriers of misunderstanding 
between class and class ; in order to bring capital 
and labor together in generous and friendly coopera- 
tion for a larger end. 

4 
Nationalism and International Policy 

The expansion of the area of our political duties 
and activities, emphasized by the War and certain 
to be definitely outlined in the program for interna- 
tional peace and cooperation at its close, brings 
sharply before the United States the necessity for 
evolving a conscious national spirit, a national aim, 
and an international policy. 

It is a platitude that the United States has as yet 
no such spirit, aim, or policy : and it is seriously ques- 
tioned by many thinking persons whether this lack 
of nationalism is not just the priceless American 
virtue; whether lively national spirit and definite 
national aims are not at once a menace to the world 
and a shackle upon national progress. Is it perhaps 
the crowning liberalism of American citizenship that 
it implies nothing in common with other Americans 
save our common humanity ? Might not the de- 
velopment of a sturdy and self-conscious American- 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 31 

ism lead at length to the same national egotism 
which has brought Germany to the conviction of 
her cultural superiority, of her right to exploit or 
displace all supposedly inferior peoples, and of her 
sacred duty to Prussianize the world ? May not 
we too, in striving for the evolution of a strong, 
differentiated, national culture, ultimately rear a 
Chinese wall of exclusion at our intellectual fron- 
tiers ; may we not limit our national imagination, 
develop cultural intolerance and inhospitality, un- 
dermine our sense of humor and proportion, shut 
off the wholesome stream of outside influence which 
has so largely contributed to the formation of our 
race, our language, our culture, and our ideals, cripple 
and narrow our national life by inbreeding, and 
produce one of these days an America-mania different 
from but no less obnoxious than the idolatry of 
Germanism which has made possible not only the 
present war itself, but all those special phases of 
Prussian military tactics which have proved so 
incomprehensible to humanity at large ? 

These are indeed dangers which must be squarely 
faced by educators before agreeing, as we are in 
these days so often urged to do, upon a scheme for 
fostering through schooling a crystallized, conscious, 
American national spirit as distinguished from the 
English, French, German, Russian, Italian, or Jap- 
anese national spirit of other races. We do not 
wish to develop an arrogant Americanism partaking 
of the now obvious vices which the War reveals as 
having lurked in the very texture of the finished and 



32 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

so often charming life of Germany before the War. 
And if those vices are the logical outcome of any 
nationalism whatsoever, then indeed we shall not 
care to develop a racial sense at all, but shall rather 
rest content with the ill-defined individualism of our 
former policy, an individualism well characterized 
by our attitude toward immigration, which we talk 
much of assimilating yet which we satisfy ourselves 
with denationalizing. 

The War, however, cannot but call to our attention 
certain practical advantages of a more lively na- 
tional consciousness than we in America have yet 
achieved. The immense mass and impact of United 
Germany have dealt civilization a blow from which 
it still is staggering, and while undeniably dangerous 
as an aggressive weapon, this national strength, 
flowing in other channels, might have enormous 
value for the world. At the outset of the War, what 
brought the whole human, industrial, commercial, 
cultural, and educational resources of France, almost 
overnight, into the service of the nation ? Danger 
of invasion, you perhaps will say. The instant need 
of holding soil on which to lead French lives in the 
French way did indeed make the response imme- 
diate ; but what created such effective patriotism ? 
The consciousness of every French man, woman, 
and child of being French and of what it meant to 
be French rather than English, German, or Italian ; 
the consciousness that all that France held dear was 
threatened by a deadly foe, that the great history 
of the French people called from the past for con- 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 33 

tinuance and completion; the consciousness bred 
in every Frenchman from childhood in the schools 
of the Republic that to the government of which he 
himself is a responsible director and from which he 
derives his training, his comfort, and his safety, to 
that government in her hour of trial, he owes all that 
he has or is or can at best become. These are the 
factors which produced in France at the beginning 
of the War a solidarity which withstood alone and 
comparatively ill prepared the greatest military 
shock in history; these are the factors which have 
enabled France to sustain through the long years of 
war her heroic effort and increasing sacrifice. The 
United States has never had such a constructive 
patriotic program. The War has indeed brought to 
America a fuller pulse of national life ; and each 
person who has given in time, money, or effort, to 
the common cause has shared the national awaken- 
ing. Never before have the young men enrolled in our 
army felt so thrillingly that they are all Americans ; 
never have Americans so clearly seen what this land 
of ours at bottom means, and what are those prin- 
ciples of human freedom which our people stand 
ready at any cost to save. Like all unselfish wars, 
this struggle has produced a renaissance of national 
idealism, a consecration to the things of the spirit, 
an uplifting willingness to do and dare in the cause 
of right. But this awakening to our national unity, 
this response to service came more slowly and less 
effectively in America than we would wish. The edu- 
cational foundation of patriotic responsibility had 



34 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

not been laid so deep as in older, more self-conscious 
countries. At the close of the War, unless some 
special and united effort is put forth by educational 
authorities throughout the land, the glowing warmth 
of patriotic enthusiasm may cool again into our old 
indifference, and another calamity may be needed 
to spur us once again to thiak and feel on national 
lines. 

This would mean for America a loss not only in 
national strength but in individual culture. To feel 
and think in terms of many men is to enlarge the 
personality. In one of his last published articles, 
William James wrote that the great problem of 
modern civilization is to find a moral equivalent for 
war, a social motive sufficiently powerful, a collective 
experience sufficiently vivid to arouse a whole people 
to an equal consciousness of unity and stir it to 
equal cooperative effort. Perhaps this moral equiv- 
alent for war can never be evolved. But if it is to 
come, it must rest upon the same basis of national 
feeling and desire for national service. The value 
of a war is that it shocks us out of self ; leads us to 
think in terms of moral values and of larger social 
units than commonly come within our range of 
calculation. The self, the family, the chum, the 
gang, the school, one's social set, the business firm, 
the neighborhood, perhaps the community, less 
probably the locality, seldom the nation, and almost 
never humanity throughout the world — here is the 
history of social consciousness in the average indi- 
vidual. To tamper with this expansion of human 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 35 

interest at any of its stages is fatal to moral growth. 
For instance, to break down the child's loyalty to 
his chum or gang by any miscalled honor system 
which turns each individual into a spy is the greatest 
mistake in ethical pedagogy. It destroys the high- 
est social loyalty the child yet knows before a wider 
loyalty is born to take its place and, instead of remov- 
ing its limitations, kills the golden quality itself. 
On the other hand, it is the soundest sociology to 
stimulate consciousness of the group next above 
that with which men's present interest is engaged. 
There is no such thing in evolution as skipping 
grades. We must climb the ladder rung by rung. 
The nation is the largest social unit which the average 
mind can comprehend, and in the present imperfect 
state of human advancement, we shall do well if we 
secure a peace time sense of the unity of national 
interests and ideals. To think nationally is the first 
step toward wider international sympathy ; it is the 
historical link in the chain of progress ; the link to 
whose weakness is due the Russian catastrophe ; the 
link we in America have never purposefully forged. 
Domineering nations are indeed the weeds of 
history and tend to choke out other valuable growths, 
but the world's quarrel with such peoples lies in the 
form and not the fervor of their national spirit. If, 
then, a national consciousness must be our goal, 
what form shall we wish it to assume ? What object 
can we set before our citizens which will have im- 
pelling force yet never ripen into national aggres- 
sion ? The logic of events is giving us the answer. 



36 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

We live in stirring times. Little by little, century by 
century ; from the Helot uprisings of ancient Sparta 
and the slave revolts of classic Rome ; from the days 
of Magna Charta, of the Jacquerie in France, of 
Cromwell in England, and George Washington in 
America ; through the bloody terrors of the French 
Revolution and the bitter agony of our Civil War; 
little by little, century by century, man has won 
nearer to democracy, nearer to a world in which, 
free of tyranny and oppression, free of bigotry and 
intolerance, free of poverty and ignorance, each 
soul shall reach the full fruition of its individual 
powers. Abolition of slavery and social caste, reli- 
gious freedom, universal suffrage, popular education 
and government recognition of the right of labor to 
a living and a life, these were democratic gains of 
which America was proud. But the goal was not 
yet surely won, and we scarcely saw as yet the full 
implication of the word democracy. 

Then came the War, waking us from our placid 
acceptance of our good fortune and bringing to us a 
clearer and more comprehensive understanding of 
democracy. With the threat of its extinction, came 
a new love for our heritage of freedom and a new 
determination that "government of the people, by 
the people, and for the people should not perish from 
the earth." And now at last the burden of defending 
democratic institutions has fallen on America ; Presi- 
dent Wilson's great phrase "make the world safe for 
democracy" rings across two hemispheres, a new 
battle cry of freedom ; our President has become the 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 37 

spokesman and moral leader of the Allies ; and to 
us the nations look not only for the final military 
victory but for the democratic example which shall 
form the basis of the coming peace. The United 
States is the great social experiment of civilization. 
We have as Americans not only to fight for democ- 
racy on the shell-scarred plains of France but to es- 
tablish democracy firmly and successfully on our own 
soil, there to stand as a model and shining inspiration 
for the world. And we have as Americans not only 
to construct the social framework of democracy but 
by its human product to justify democracy to all 
the earth. To be a democracy in name and fact, to 
live as well as die for our ideals, here is the national 
purpose for which we must retain through education 
the thrilling urgency of war-engendered patriotism. 
"Peace has her Belgiums" whose cry went long 
unheeded in the days before the War. Socially, re- 
ligiously, legally, industrially, politically — is there 
need to enumerate our failures ? After years of 
effort, we had at length secured a federal law pro- 
hibiting interstate traflic in articles manufactured by 
child labor. This law did not affect concerns which 
cater to a local market ; and in laundries and tene- 
ment occupations, in theaters and shops, in the 
street trades so dangerous to life and limb and 
budding soul, even in industry, evading infrequent 
factory inspection, children were after its passage 
still employed in many and many a state throughout 
the Union. But the law was a beginning and enun- 
ciated a forward looking principle. Now the Su- 



38 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

preme Court has, on a mere technicality, declared 
the bill unconstitutional. The great southern cotton 
mills are calling back the children to their looms ; 
the fight must be fought again; another generation 
must stagger prematurely with the load of toil. Is 
it democracy thus to prey upon the weak and rob 
the nation at its very fount and source ? We have 
long known that no woman can live decently on 
less than eight dollars a week, yet the average for 
working women is nearer six ! Is that democracy ? 
In a western mining state, a great corporation elected, 
owned, and operated every political official in its 
county, including the judge in whose court cases 
between this corporation and its employees were 
tried. Was that democracy ? And when the under- 
standable discontent of the miners in that district 
with these and other conditions of their life and 
work culminated in organized agitation, a long and 
bloody strike ensued because of the refusal of the 
company to meet with, treat with, or recognize the 
collectively elected representatives of their employ- 
ees. Was that democracy ? The terrible story of 
East St. Louis is still vivid in our minds, the story 
of how the bitterness of a long industrial struggle 
coupled with the stupidity of race hatred culminated 
in a night of savagery which an eye witness stigma- 
tized as "worse than Belgium." Indeed and indeed, 
America was scarcely a democracy. 

And when our methods were in themselves demo- 
cratic, they were often far from being efficiently 
and successfully so. From day to day as the War 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 39 

went on, one weakness after another in our body 
politic appeared. The mutual failure of labor and 
capital to reach a working agreement, which we 
tolerated as a mere annoyance in times of peace, 
suddenly in this hour of peril when our very national 
existence depended on swift production, was seen at 
last in its true light as an unpardonable and calam- 
itous national negligence. In the copper mines of 
Arizona, the Pacific oil and lumber fields, and the 
packing and the shipping industries, the industrial 
turmoil which we at first explained as German 
propaganda, a federal commission has attributed to 
faults long latent in our industrial situation. We 
have allowed labor to remain ignorant, capital to 
remain democratically unprogressive ; and now we 
see the slowness with which uneducated labor and 
undemocratic capital subordinate a grievance to 
national ideals. The sluggish, expensive, redupli- 
cative, diffuse, and blundering system which we 
have long accepted in lieu of government, suddenly 
betrays its incapacity when called upon to act in 
national defense. The inconsistency of our legisla- 
tive economy reveals itself when, with Anti-Trust 
laws upon our statutes, we consolidate war produc- 
tion in the interest of efficiency. The laxness of 
our civic habits comes strangely into light when we 
must reorganize municipal police and sanitary codes 
to make our cities safe recreation centers for our 
soldiery. Feeling here and there with subtle fingers, 
the great strain of war has found out one by one the 
weak spots in our national life. We have stood the 



40 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

strain — splendidly. But we know where we have 
felt it most. After the War, let us take stock of 
our democracy and recast our institutions in a finer, 
purer, stronger democratic mold. Count Okuma, 
"the oldest, most experienced, and ablest statesman 
of Japan," watching the present occidental conflict 
with his impersonal vision, foresees in it the death 
of European civilization. It is for nations like the 
United States which may emerge still unbroken from 
the struggle to arrest the force of dissolution ; to 
lift, purge, and fortify our civilization; to keep in 
every phase of life "those heights" which, war 
inspired, the national soul "has soared to reach" ; 
to make of the period after the War, not the twilight 
which the Orient sees falling upon the western worldj 
but "another morning risen on midnoon," a rebirth 
and reconstruction. 

But to recast our institutions in this democratic 
mold is the means and not the end of national con- 
sciousness Peoples, like individuals, have here- 
tofore been spurred to effort largely by the need for 
self-protection or the desire for larger spheres of 
power through material possessions. It will be for 
America to shift the emphasis. Not the acquisi- 
tion of territory at the expense of other nations, 
not the humiliation of other races, not the exer- 
tion of power in the concerns of other peoples than 
our own shall be our aim, but the justification of 
democracy by its human product, the enrichment of 
personality by a freer and fuller common life. For 
such an emphasis, our times are ripe. The War has 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 41 

awakened us to those deficiencies in our democracy 
which limit not only our national strength but the 
material welfare of our individual citizens ; and it 
remains only to apply these hard-won lessons to 
our political and industrial organization in order to 
give to each American the economic foundation for 
personal culture. Our national resources are tamed 
and harnessed to the wheels of industry; the basic 
struggle for existence in America is won, and abun- 
dance waits on man for distribution. A population 
blent of the hardy and adventurous elements of 
every nation holds our soil. The brilliance and vigor 
of our climate is at work bronzing and energizing 
our racial stock, quickening the pace of life, and 
eliminating generation by generation the weakling 
and the sluggard who survive in milder, grayer at- 
mospheres. To achieve a rich and resourceful back- 
ground of national culture, it remains only to shape 
this rough-hewn substance into a form expressive 
of its inner meaning ; to create in manners and cus- 
toms, in art and music, in poetry, fiction, and drama, 
in dress and architecture, in commerce, industry, and 
agriculture spontaneous outgrowths of American 
feeling ; modes, and materials of life assistant to our 
human development. Where the American home 
clings to the soil with the homely weight of native 
stone, simple, spacious, and hospitable, matching 
the rock-strewn slopes from which it rises in fit and 
natural beauty ; where the business structure springs 
to heaven with the daring leap of high finance, we 
have achieved American architecture ; made of our 



42 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

shelter a larger body, flesh of our flesh, bone of our 
bone, filled by the same soul. When every life is 
lived to its full measure, when every act and tool of 
life share this expressiveness, the purpose of Ameri- 
can national consciousness will be fulfilled. 

This purpose has in view, however, no narrow, self- 
centered culture. A mode of life reaches perfection 
at the moment when it ceases to be valuable. To 
be oneself most fully and completely, yet to be 
affable to the new and strange, tolerant of the dif- 
ferent, interested in the infinite variety of the world's 
human output, and constantly adding to one's na- 
ture new congenial elements — that is to make the 
most of oneself as a human being. No gain at the 
expense of another is a gain in personality; it is a 
"deadly deduction" from the sum total of our being. 
As I appreciate and enter into the life and tastes 
of my brother, I become a richer nature, appropri- 
ating vicariously his virtue for my own. I share 
with him his superiorities. So also with nations. 
To study and understand another national culture, 
is to become that much the richer by the contact. 
The world will be humanly poor only when it is 
uniform. America is the living proof that the 
European War was unnecessary, that varying 
cultures can meet and interpenetrate — America, 
the land where the sons of many nations live freely 
side by side in mutual respect, contributing to and 
sharing a richer and more varied common life; a 
land of provinces, where East and West, North and 
South, mountain and prairie develop their own man- 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 43 

ners and customs, creeds and dialects, art and liter- 
ature, yet where North and South, East and West, 
mountain and prairie join hands in union, sharing 
a common aim, breathing a common spirit, e pluribus 
unum, now and forever, one and inseparable! Our 
international policy, therefore, must surely be one 
of tolerance and cooperation, interchange, and fed- 
eration for a common human end. 

To be specific then, we need and are indeed evolv- 
ing, to meet the responsibilities of the new world- 
era now opening before us, a lively national purpose 
to be the most efficient and complete democracy, 
intellectually, industrially, politically, and socially 
in the civilized world; and an international policy 
which would apply these democratic principles co- 
operatively to all the nations, guaranteeing to every 
people its free foothold in the sun, encouraging the 
flowering of every racial culture, great or small, fa- 
cilitating the interchange of human values through- 
out the world, and providing for the maintenance of 
this international democracy the machinery necessary 
for its security. "We stand for the immediate 
establishment, actually as a part of the treaty of 
peace with which the present war will end, of a 
universal league or society of nations, a superna- 
tional authority, with an international high court to 
try all justiciable issues between nations; an inter- 
national legislature to enact such common laws as 
can be mutually agreed upon, an international 
council of mediation to endeavor to settle without 
ultimate conflict even those disputes which are not 



44 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

justiciable" and an international combination of 
forces to uphold its findings against any outlaw from 
the common lot. What form this League of Nations 
may assume, it would be premature to prophesy. 
But America must stand before the world as the 
champion of "a concert of power, an organized com- 
mon peace, a world safe for democracy." 



Preparation for Social Citizenship 

American life, then, cursorily reviewed, presents 
four striking aspects ; a rapidly widening circle of 
culture ; a progressive socialization of production and 
democratization of industrial control; a system of 
direct and popular government which, while liberal 
and educative, demands of the citizen increasing 
intelligence and efficiency; and a growing national 
consciousness which seeks greatness through excel- 
lence and international cooperation. For the com- 
plex tasks of her national and international future, 
America is whetting her tools. But the educative 
work of life is slow ; can we not accelerate its deep, 
sure processes ? 

For how well, in spite of our widening circle of 
culture and education, are we as yet prepared to 
meet these political and industrial problems of our 
daily life ? And what is the contribution of our 
common schools to a more intelligent citizenship 
and a better social order ? 

Is the average industrial worker or the average 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 45 

American citizen, for that matter, fitted to take over 
a responsible share in the conduct of big business ? 
This new socialization of production, this new democ- 
ratization of industry is taking place at a time 
when, owing to excessive specialization of industrial 
processes and the accompanying decay of appren- 
ticeship, industry is unable to train either its oper- 
atives or its managing directors. Industrial educa- 
tion is the response to this need of industry for 
trained workers ; higher technical schools are the 
response to its need for skilled supervisors. Now 
the time approaches when the operative must join 
in industrial management; but what conception 
of the whole intricate problem of manufacturing 
and selling shoes can an operative have whose only 
connection with the matter is to run a buttonhole ma- 
chine day by day, week by week, month by month ? 
How wise will his vote be in deciding the policy of 
the concern ? Yet as a union member or a voter in a 
city where franchises are up for approval, he is 
probably contributing his share to business adminis- 
tration. The outsider who, even in sympathetic 
mood, attends trade union meetings, is constantly 
impressed by the inevitably one-sided and narrow 
character of their deliberations. The workers can- 
not see the business of manufacture as a whole. 
They see their own corner with terrible distinctness ; 
the rest is blank, not because of stupidity or malevo- 
lence on their part, but because the highly specialized 
modern factory can never give the operative the 
connected view of an industry as a whole which is 



46 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

necessary if trade unions are ever to cooperate intel- 
ligently in determining conditions of labor and pay ; 
if popular legislation is to be fair, constructive and 
productive of prosperity ; and if state and municipal 
ownership is to become more than a by-word for 
inefficiency. 

It will be noted here, perhaps, that I speak not 
of the need of labor for industrial skill but solely for 
business intelligence. The matter of vocational 
training is indeed vital.^ Sooner or later, in the 
trade schools of our country, every American youth 
of either sex will be given adequate technical prepa- 
ration for wage-earning work. But the ordinary 
trade training which has now become a part of every 
up-to-date school system does not wholly meet the 
new emergency. Trade Schools study mechanics; 
they seldom study business, and the grade schools in 
which the bulk of our population receive their only 
education give their students little conception of 
the great economic and social forces which will 
determine their whole after life. 

Does everyday experience on the other hand pre- 
pare the worker any better for his responsibility in 
the conduct of socialized or democratized industry ? 
Our daily life is fragmentary. At a time when the 
duty of large-scale social thinking is thrust upon us, 
our daily round brings us small-scale, fractional ex- 
periences. We see life in cross section. The city 
child seldom sees the whole of any process. He 

^ See The People's School : a Study in Vocational Training by the 
author. 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 47 

eats the vegetables upon the table. He may trace 
them to the grocery. Of the middle man who han- 
dles, of the railway that carries, and of the farmer who 
plants and cultivates them, he has no picture. The 
"store" is the Alpha and Omega of his economic 
thinking. The intricate human business of produc- 
tion has no more place in his mind than in the magic 
tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. To the 
country child, manufacture and commerce are 
equally mysterious. School, industry, the daily 
round — none has as yet equipped the citizen for the 
industrial task whose performance will determine his 
own happiness and the welfare of the productive 
agencies of the nation. 

The school has ignored the problem ; daily life 
obscures it ; the modern organization of industry has 
only added to its complication. For, as we have 
already pointed out, on the one side industry has 
produced the capitalist employer, separated from 
personal contact with his workmen ; regarding them 
more or less inevitably as cogs in the machine ; and 
feeling toward the labor organizer who dares to 
meddle with his factory much the same sense of 
personal outrage as the husband who goes out with 
a gun to seek the villain who has touched his own, 
private, personal, and particular wife : while on the 
other hand, industry produces the labor organiza- 
tion, which, with growing power, submits less and 
less willingly to arbitration and looks more and more 
to legislative domination. On the one side, the 
capitalist who talks about his business ; on the other 



48 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

the laborer who talks about his rights ; on the one 
hand the capitalist who cannot understand industrial 
democracy ; on the other, labor which is unprepared 
for industrial democracy. Public education exists 
to reconcile such conflicts. Government ownership 
and the labor movement are a challenge to our school 
curricula. The day is past when we can argue for 
or against them. Labor organization with all its 
power is here; government ownership with its de- 
mands upon civic enterprise is here ; and it is the 
problem of the schools to make public ownership 
efficient and labor organization safe and intelligent 
by education.^ 

For handling general political questions, the voter 
is perhaps somewhat better equipped. Politics has 
long been the piece de resistance of newspaper articles 
and male conversation. From the welter of partisan 
press notices, fragmentary gossip and street corner 
rumor, something like the truth about local matters 
may at length emerge for the guidance of the well- 
intentioned citizen. But what preliminary knowl- 
edge or ideals does the grammar school graduate 
bring to his initial vote ? What conception has he 
of community life with its problems and mutual 
responsibilities ? What vision of American destiny ? 
What dream of "the parliament of nations, the 
federation of the world" ? How familiar to him are 
the larger political issues upon which he will be called 

^ These labor problems become even more acute at the close of 
the war, when soldiers must be reabsorbed into industry, commerce, and 
agriculture at the very time when war production ceases. 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 49 

to ballot ? How dear to his heart the progressive 
laws his representatives will be called upon to pass ? 
What understanding has he acquired of European 
nations, of our common racial origin, of our unity 
of language, our partnership in history and culture, 
our interdependence in commerce, our common 
problems, and the essential solidarity of our interests 
and theirs ? What in short besides teaching him to 
read and write and figure, sketching a dry outline 
of our own history, baring the fleshless skeleton of 
civics to his uninterested eye, and then leaving him 
to the mercy of the press, has the grammar school 
done better to equip our future voter for his politi- 
cal responsibilities ? 

It is easy to explain the failure of education to 
grapple with such industrial and political problems. 
The public schools live by taxation ; they must of- 
fend no section of influential opinion. Education 
has been so occupied with being safe that it has 
often become vapid. To teach socially, one must 
have a social theory. But a social theory above 
all things has been forbidden for teachers as danger- 
ous, and to have no constructive ideas about life 
has been if not the ne plus ultra, at least a highly 
acceptable point in pedagogic qualification. The 
urgency of the present crisis, however, forces not 
only on individuals but on whole school systems the 
necessity of formulating some coherent social pro- 
gram ; of relating the course of study to this program ; 
and of sending pupils forth equipped with definite 
social standards and ideals. 



50 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

It may be hastily conceived by some readers that 
I intend to advocate direct and formal teaching in 
the grades of civics, economics, and sociology. This 
is by no means my intention, although, in the light 
of past experience, it is not an unthinkable propo- 
sition. The trend of subject matter has been 
downward in the educational system. The high 
school of to-day is the college of yesterday ; the 
grammar school of to-day is the academy of yester- 
day. Perhaps the grammar school may some day 
assume the high school problems of to-day. It is 
only a matter of time till economics and sociology 
will have as stable a position as history in high school 
curricula. And are land, labor, and capital, division 
of labor and specialization, bargaining and the de- 
termination of wages and prices, rent, interest, and 
the rest so abstruse and complicated that the twelve- 
and thirteen-year-old grade school child could not 
work out in class games, class discussions, and visits 
to neighboring factories and markets some concep- 
tion of these factors upon which his whole future 
wage-earning life depends ? I understand that an 
elementary text in economics for grade pupils is 
already on the market.^ Perhaps such formal teach- 
ing, transformed from existing college courses in 
both method and matter, may some day be an answer 
to our problem. 

The design of this present book, however, is merely 
to suggest how the current subject matter of grade 
school teaching may be so manipulated as to give 

1 Frank Leavitt, Elementary Social Science, The Macmillan Company. 



THE WORLD TO-DAY 51 

children indirectly and in a manner interesting and 
within their comprehension, some knowledge of the 
origin and growth of social institutions and the nature 
of current industrial, political, and social organization. 
We have before our eyes an example of democracy 
failing through lack of such educative preparation. 
Poor tortured Russia, exasperating Russia, deserting 
the cause of liberty at the very moment when she 
might have won eternal victory. "Look at Russia," 
says the political reactionary. "There is democ- 
racy! Is that the sort of government we want?" 
But Russia's blundering to-day is not democracy. 
No ! It is the aftermath of Tsardom. Russia sowed 
the wind and she reaped the whirlwind; Russia 
sowed autocracy and she reaped revolution ; Russia 
sowed tyranny and persecution and she reaped an- 
archy ; Russia sowed ignorance and poverty and she 
reaped the Bolsheviki. In America we too have 
seen that harvest; we have sowed poverty and in- 
dustrial ignorance and we are reaping the I. W. W. 
The cure for that disease is not the sheriff but the 
school-teacher. It is education that in the end makes 
the world safe for democracy and democracy safe 
for the world. 

I To teach the child the history of human civilization 
throughout its various stages, to lead him to under- 
stand the forces at work in the world to-day, and to 
fit him for his share in the common life — this is 
the function of education. It will be the work of 
later chapters to point out how education can begin 
to fulfill this function in the grades, j 



Ill 

READING AND WRITING 

Since the beginning of civilization, the three R's 
have formed the substance of education, for reading 
and writing are the tools of cumulative knowledge 
and communication ; and arithmetic, the medium of 
economic life. By numerical calculation, we hold 
our own in the face of nature, estimate the chances 
of life and season, and conduct the business of manu- 
facture and commerce in a social world. Writing 
and reading, on the other hand, are not only a means 
but a mode of life itself. For how much of living 
comes to us through books which we should miss in 
first-hand contact with the world. By the turn of 
a page we are whisked to the ends of the earth and 
walk at ease with their inhabitants ; encounter types 
with which our social round will never bring us face 
to face ; live a hundred lives, pass through a hundred 
experiences which would never fall to our own hum- 
drum lot. In books, there lives for us "the sacred 
past that cannot pass away" ; we weep with Hecuba 
upon the walls of Troy; dare with Csesar at the 
Rubicon ; die with the Spartans at Thermopylae. 
In books, all lives and times are ours, not flittingly 
but to live through again and yet again, draining the 

52 



READING AND WRITING 53 

bitter and the sweet, the zest, the pang, and the 
significance. Geographically, historically, socially, 
emotionally, intellectually, literature offers us a 
vast expansion of experience beyond the limited 
existence we should else wise live in time and space. 
An insight into and understanding of life as a whole, 
an impersonal and objective view of experience, a 
new power over ideas through their adequate ex- 
pression, a recreative escape from the limitations of 
life, satisfaction of our hunger for permanence in 
things, and a brighter vision of the ideal, 

" The light that never was on sea or land. 
The consecration and the p>oet*s dream " — 

all these come to us from the great literature of the 
world clearly and luminously as they never come 
through the broken lights and darks of the daily 
life in which we are immersed. 

And how much of this expansion and deepening 
of personality through literature do we give the 
students in our common schools ? 

The last decade has, indeed, witnessed a renais- 
sance in the teaching of reading. The slow, old- 
fashioned oral method, once necessary when both 
books and literate persons were few and far between, 
has given place, in part at least and in the upper 
grades, to silent reading, which has supplanted 
listening or reading aloud for the average adult in 
these days of cheap printing and compulsory educa- 
tion. With the introduction of the silent method 
has come a wider range and greater bulk of reading 



54 SOCIALIZING THE THREE KS 

than was possible under the old system; and the 
attempt to familiarize grade school pupils with the 
best poetry and fiction suitable to their age and 
comprehension has followed as a natural result of 
the shifting of emphasis from the mechanics of oral 
reading to the substance and enjoyment of the mat- 
ter read. Literature readers and even selected 
classics have replaced the time-worn collection of 
declamatory pieces, with some losses to be sure, but 
also with certain gains. Supplemental reading, 
credit for books read at home, and encouragement of 
the use of public libraries, all are designed to foster 
the habit and the love of reading. And scientific 
study of the reading process has produced new 
methods of instruction that advance the child more 
rapidly to a mastery of the printed page which 
assures him a permanent means of recreation and 
self -education. The start has been made toward 
utilizing reading as a means of cultivation; and 
the lines are already clearly marked for further 
progress. 

The effort in grade and high school English teach- 
ing is naturally directed in the main toward strength- 
ening the student's powers of literary expression 
and appreciation. This effort has been more success- 
ful in its first than in its second aim. My students, 
with all their glaring faults in composition, write 
and talk more intelligently than they read. And 
their mental capacities are almost always far ahead 
of the books they choose for independent reading. 
What lengthy English drill the high school graduate 



READING AND WRITING 55 

has undergone in his passage through the schools, 
and how sKght its traces on his literary taste ! In 
the course of my own teaching, I have asked pupils 
from the public high school, from exclusive private 
preparatory schools, and from private and public 
collegiate institutions to prepare for me several 
hundred individual lists containing, to the best of 
their memory and ability, all the books which they 
had ever read. These lists were made as class exper- 
iments, after discussion of the values we can get from 
literature that we cannot get from life. The work 
was ungraded ; no credit was given for long lists ; and 
every effort was made to secure unvarnished state- 
ments, the whole purpose being to discover what 
sort of books we had been reading and whether we 
had selected them so as really to widen our expe- 
rience. The lists were arranged alphabetically by 
authors under the rough classifications of fiction, 
biography, poetry, drama, history, science, art, 
travel, and essays ; and from these lists, a composite 
was prepared indicating how many persons had read 
each book. This composite was then exposed for 
class inspection, discussion, and comparison with the 
single lists, and was found to consist largely of novels 
by second-rate American authors, embodying com- 
monplace ideas, dealing with a kind of life with which 
the students were already familiar, and offering 
little or no expansion of experience. For many 
young people, coming as they do from homes where 
reading forms no part of daily life, it is undoubtedly 
a gain to read at all ; yet in view of the effort that 



56 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

has gone into instruction, classroom English ought 
to leave a deeper mark. 

This failure of teaching to affect the reading 
habits of the pupils in our common schools has a 
social significance not instantly apparent to the 
practical observer. 

Can we wonder that the student who has thus 
lived imprisoned in the narrow bounds of his own 
personal experience exhibits a lack of mental affabil- 
ity and imagination, not the flimsy make-believe of 
fancy, but penetrative imagination, as Ruskin names 
it, the faculty of entering into and understanding 
situations other than our own ? Yet this gift of 
imagination is the sine qua non of existence in a 
complex social world. The failure of the Russian 
offensive which might have forced an early peace 
and insured the safety of democracy, .sprang at 
bottom from imaginative incapacity. The interna- 
tional alliance, the meaning of the war and its relation 
to his individual lot, the whole grand spectacle of 
world-freedom fighting with a deadly foe, had no 
existence for the timid peasant, product of unen- 
lightened and oppressive ages. The War itself — 
what was it but the offspring of an unimaginative 
world bounded by national aims, habits, and ideals ? 
Political corruption and the indifference of voters 
and legislators to the great social issues of city, 
state, and national government are indices of our own 
imaginative lack. The food bill upon which in 
part depended the outcome of a war for which we 
spent our men and millions, in time of crisis and 



READING AND WRITING 57 

harvest, dragged week after week, month after 
month, through the two houses of an unimaginative 
Congress. The prolonged selfishness of capital and 
labor, the first resistance to food regulation, the 
apathy of so many women in the face of the call 
to national service, the strange incompetency of 
leaders on the shipping board who stood at dead 
lock while the U-boats took their weekly toll, — these 
too are but the outcome of untouched imagination. 

Therefore, to make instruction tell in cultivating 
a literary taste which will expand individual per- 
sonality to the breadth of civic and international 
life, is the great social duty of our English teachers. 

This can be done only by vitalizing our English 
work ; by scrapping the idea that there are classics 
every child should know^; by selecting first-rate, 
fascinating, largely fictional material from all the 
world's great literatures and setting the children to 
reading not selections but whole books, just for fun, 
as fast as they can, over and over again as long as 
the interest lasts, in attractive — if cheap — library 
editions, and somewhat as they will. And this 
vitalizing must begin in the grade school curriculum. 
For strange as it may seem, just when the child 

^ "There should be a warning against the use of the word 'child' in 
the titles of books intended for children. Every child apes the adult, 
earnestly wishes to be older, and deems his childhood a stigma. One 
of my youngsters was presented by a maiden lady with a splendid volume 
of verse, but it was entitled Poems Every Child Should Know. His re- 
mark to me upon the occasion was, 'Gee, I wish I could find a book 
called Songs Every Old Maid Should Sing. I'd fire it back at her. ' " 

A. L. W. 



58 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

needs the most fluid, most personal, most vital 
methods, then it is that we have most formahzed our 
Enghsh teaching. To the grade school pupil, we 
offer spelling, reading mechanics, and formal Eng- 
lish grammar, necessary but purely technical matters 
of attainment, the tools and not the substance of 
reading and writing. Spelling no school system 
has yet claimed to teach successfully to those pupils 
for whom it long remains a necessary special study. 
The average high school freshman brings from his 
seven-year contact with the elements of English 
grammar an inability to write an English sentence, 
plus the notion that grammar is a set of rules for 
recitation use alone. And very many college fresh- 
men fail to get the substance from a printed page. 
Have we taught wrong or taught the wrong things 
in the lower grades ? The answer may hold much of 
both hypotheses. 

Spelling is a top for every man to spin in this 
reformatory age ; yet I hesitate to offer my solution 
of the mystery because it is too much a cutting of 
the Gordian knot to recommend itself to makers of 
curricula. Of course, the old-fashioned oral spelling 
has gone out of date; we have discovered that we 
never spell aloud in life, that the champion of the 
oral spelling match cannot always set words down 
correctly on a sheet of paper ; and that to translate 
oral spelling into writing is a slow process for the 
penman or stenographer. We do teach written 
spelling in these later days ; yet what a grinding 
business it often is, and what time it takes which 



READING AND WRITING 59 

might be given to reading or to written work ! And 
even if the set spelling lesson be retained (as indeed it 
must until we find a better substitute, since poor spell- 
ing is so effectual a handicap in business life), we must 
admit that many pupils learn to spell the common 
words and learn how to acquire those they do not 
know long before the eighth grade is reached and 
the spelling drill is discontinued, just as most chil- 
dren learn the mechanics of reading long before the 
tardy few for whom the reading class is held grade 
after grade — the quick readers growing more and 
more impatient and uninterested ; the slow readers 
embarrassed by the competition of their more rapid 
neighbors. 

But if formal spelling is discontinued, what can 
we offer in its place that will produce better spelling 
results in the end and be at the time of more educa- 
tional value to the pupil ? Let us look for the 
answer to the causes of poor spelling ! Your thor- 
oughly poor speller is not so much a poor speller as 
a poor observer. He is probably a poor reader ; he 
probably does not catch the colors, sights, and 
sounds recorded on the page before his eyes ; he prob- 
ably misses the point of the problem in arithmetic 
until you have asked him to read it over, looking 
for what he knows and what he has to prove; he 
probably does not note the details of tree and bird 
and flower on his daily walk. His is a lack of con- 
centrated, minute attention and visual observation, 
and all the rote teaching of spelling in the world, 
especially the spelling of word lists in which he has 



60 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

no interest, will not make him spell until this con- 
stitutional defect is removed. Authoritative studies 
of the spelling process ^ bear out the contention that 
the problem is one of observation and fixation, and 
rightly place the emphasis on teaching the child 
how to study his spelling lesson instead of on testing 
him upon it ; but they do not always recognize the 
wider bearings of this fundamental fact or propose 
solutions which bring into play the related powers 
that go to make up not only the good speller but 
the accurate recorder of all the varied phenomena 
of life. It remains for us to discover such a 
solution, which will both develop the powers of 
verbal observation and furnish an incentive for 
their use. 

In the first place, there ought to be a course in 
observation of all sorts, including visual, in every 
grammar grade. The person who will write a prac- 
tical manual of the subject will confer a priceless 
boon on elementary teachers.^ But nature study; 
drawing ; map making ; scout work ; flash glimpses of 
pictures, sentences, words, lists of figures, and single 

^ No grade or high school teacher can afiFord not to read The Teaching 
of Spelling by Henry Suzzallo, which remains, among many good books, 
the best practical manual of this difficult art. See also The Child and 
His Spelling by Cook and O'Shea. These books will give the spelling 
teacher a method which produces a retentive mastery of words taught 
and power to acquire independently new words as need arises. 

2 The child needs training not only in visual observation but in the 
use of all his senses. Every grade school teacher should read Madame 
Montessori on this subject and familiarize himself further with the Boy 
Scout manual and the manuals used in the army for the training of 
scouts, aviators, etc. 



READING AND WRITING 61 

numbers ; the old game of listing at a glance a group 
of miscellaneous small objects or of describing after 
a rapid survey a person's dress even down to the 
number of buttons on his coat cuff ; observing and 
describing the details of an experiment, watching 
and reproducing a gymnastic drill, a hundred such 
ways will suggest themselves to the resourceful 
instructor in which powers of at least visual ob- 
servation can be daily trained through exercises 
and games vividly interesting to the children and 
forming a restful variation from individual book 
work. Of this sort of drill, spelling games that 
teach the child to see a word at a flash with all its 
letters will form a natural and entertaining part; 
and will introduce the matter of spelling in the pre- 
cise connection which gives the poor speller his 
fundamental difficulty. 

But how shall we lead the student to apply these 
powers of observation to his spelling ? How give 
him a vital interest in the acquisition of new words ? 
It must be remembered that a good speller is not a 
person who can spell lists of words from a spelling 
book, but a person who can write correctly what he 
wants to say and acquire quickly new words he 
comes upon in reading or conversation and subse- 
quently needs to use. The only logical incentive 
to correct spelling is the desire to write. The most 
natural spelling source is the books, magazines, or 
newspapers the child reads. Teach an observant 
child to like to read and write and the spelling will 
come of itself. No formal spelling then in our ideal 



62 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

school except as anticipatory preparation for com- 
position in which new words are likely to appear/ 
or as corrective teaching of words used in composi- 
tion without properly looking them up and hence 
misspelled. But plenty of using words in writing 
(and for enlarging the vocabulary especially in writ- 
ing based on pleasure reading), and plenty of point- 
ing out new words in books and looking up new 
words in the dictionary before the pupils get them 
wrong. Thus to acquire incidentally in its natural 
relation to reading and writing, the ability to notice, 
fix in the mind and master, or to find in the dictionary 
a new desired word, is the open sesame to successful 
spelling. All the scientific devices evolved in the 
skillful teaching of formal spelling can be employed 
with equal success in an indirect attack upon the 
subject. 

This new method will no doubt be harder for the 
teacher; she will be always teaching spelling; she 
cannot devote one half hour to the business each 
day and call her duty done. But the spelling will 
be a real and vital tool ; the child will have a practical 
interest in learning to spell a word correctly since he 
is learning it in order to use it immediately in his 
written work; he will spell more easily, read more, 
write better ; and the curriculum will be opened up 
at a new point to the social possibilities of English 

^ Note here how easily the teacher can discover the new words the 
child is likely to employ in a given composition by talking the subject 
over before the children write. That is the time for learning to spell 
the words, thus preventing the initial errors which are so hard to cure. 



READING AND WRITING 63 

teaching in the grades.^ This idea is no longer a 
mere theory. Madame Montessori's pupils write 
without spelling drill — just as babies learn to talk, 
naturally. They simply write words, whole, or- 
ganic, undissected words which they have come to 
know and need. Spelling is analysis, philology, 
the last and not the first step in English study, 
the field for scholars, experts, graybeards, and not 
children ! 

Needless to say, reformed spelling will greatly 
facilitate learning how to write by linking oral and 
written unit in an obvious way ; and will make rapid 
reading much easier for beginners by reducing 
the number of symbols they must memorize. And 
reformed spelling is not only simpler but closer to 
the genius of our language. Let him who laments its 
fancied loss of etymology compare a revised word 
list with some Chaucerian or Spenserian text — to 
go no further back — and note the similarity, often 
in those very items which he most decries in the 
"new spelling." Such opponents convict them- 
selves of ignorance. Etymology rests in any case 
on speech sounds, not on letters, and philology 
deals but little with the written alphabet. There 
is nothing subtle, mystic, or sacred about spelling ; 
it is merely a sound notation at the start, modifying 
itself somewhat more slowly than speech sounds 
alter in the growth of dialects. All of the written 

^ See Freeman : Psychology of the Common Branches, Chapter VI, for 
arguments against the incidental method of teaching spelling and for 
suggestions as to a combination of drill and incidental instruction. 



64 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

western languages are phonetic — English very 
clumsily so, to be sure, a fact which disguises the 
essentially phonetic nature of our chaotic spelling. 
With some forty-two speech sounds in our language, 
we have hundreds of ways of writing them, not by 
any means always indicative of verbal origins. 
There are anywhere from four to six ways of spelling 
each of our eighteen vowel sounds and several of 
the consonants in the alphabet are duplicates. This 
is just as phonetic as the revised spelling only 
stupider. Old English was more simple. It is only 
the mistaken thought of language as written first 
and spoken afterwards that leads us to attach such 
value to the printed forms we know. Living lan- 
guage, however, is spoken language, phonetic lan- 
guage. Spelling often obscures etymology by its 
variations and substitutions while a phonetic alpha- 
bet would give us language history in letters any 
child could read. Strip language of the mummy 
togs of dead speech habits. Reform spelling if only 
for the sake of future etymologists. My own repug- 
nance for the new mode is merely sentimental, I am 
sure ; and when a generation has been reared who 
know no other spelling, "Teers, idul teers," will 
read as sweetly to the eye as the orthoepy to which 
we are accustomed. 

But this is all beside our present mark. Our 
query is whether formal instruction in the mechanics 
of an unsettled spelling is the most stimulating lan- 
guage work which we can give the future citizens 
of our complex social world. Formal spelling I 



READING AND WRITING 65 

omit then from discussion, calling experience, philol- 
ogy, and Madame Montessori to my aid.^ 

Grammar offers more difficulties to such summary 
disposal ; but disposed of in its present form, it must 
and soon will be. Formal grammar is the science 
of language, an abstraction dealing, like algebra, with 
generalizations and formulse. This is not the stuff 
for childish study or comprehension. Childhood is 
the time for the specific. To use language, not to 
talk about it, is the child's own natural way. The 
study of grammar in the grades had its rise in the 
effort to purify the speech of an illiterate public, and 
the study has not been without effect. But it is 
safe to say that rules have seldom taught a child to 
talk correctly. Example and correction may have 
helped, and as I should teach spelling by reading 
and writing, so should I teach grammar by speaking, 
writing, and reading, using rules seldom and only to 
correct mistakes, never for themselves alone.^ Thus 
grammar would become what vital grammar is, a 

^ Extensive experience with poor spellers in high school and college 
classes confirms my opinion that the remedy is not more spelling drill 
of the old type, but a radical change in the orientation of grade school 
spelling work. I should like further to state that much wholesale criti- 
cism of the failure of our schools to teach spelling "as well as in the old 
days" seems to me entirely unjustified. Pupils spell better to-day than 
ever before. The critics forget that to-day we have universal education; 
and furthermore that increasing numbers of persons now rise to business 
and clerical positions where their spelling habits become conspicuous. 

2 See Chubb's Teaching of English, p. 225, for an outline of a grade 
school language course in which language work, grammar, and composi- 
tion are combined. The plan is somewhat formal, but it may prove 
suggestive. 
F 



66 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

means to clear expression, a part of language and 
not a set of rules to be applied externally to speech. 
Almost any high school freshman will tell you with 
fearful glibness that "a sentence is the expression of 
thought in words." The same freshman has no 
notion of what a thought may be. And the same 
freshi;nan will speak and write in scraps of phrases 
showing the incompleteness of his mental processes. 
If to know the thing before the rule be good pedagogy, 
attention to his thinking, writing, and speaking is 
what this freshman needs. The child who hears 
good English in his home requires no grammar drill 
to speak the language well. And formal grammar 
has failed to correct the bad speech habits of the 
child who hears poor English when outside of school. 
The inference is clear ; and more talking, writing, and 
reading, and less grammar let it be. 

The difficulty of teaching formal grammar in the 
grades is greatly increased by the lack of good text- 
books for instruction. It is almost safe to say that 
there are no reliable, scholarly, teachable Enghsh 
grammars. Many texts indeed there are embodying 
the preferences of their authors. Many texts are 
mere compilations from other older texts based in 
turn on textbooks older still, and often unreliable 
even as sources of antiquarian information. Many 
texts might better be described as Latin gram- 
mars of the English language, so completely has the 
structure of our mother tongue been warped therein 
to fit the classic bias of the old school grammarian. 
And there are many texts by authors crassly ignorant 



READING AND WRITING 67 

of the history of our language and its several sources, 
who interpret idioms in the light of their own in- 
genious logic instead of consulting language history 
for origins and descents. The average formal 
English grammar treats of an embalmed tongue, 
smelling of grave clothes and the eighteenth century, 
and forms no chart for the distracted child wandering 
in the mazes of present-day illiterate speech.^ The 
average grammar still strives to force a non-con- 
temporary and non-historical use of shall for the 
first person simple future, in the teeth of all the fine 
old English lines where sceolan bears its weight of 
doom and tragedy and willan indicates the simple 
time to come. Dead issues like the split infinitive 
still raise their heads on every page. Yet grammar is 
not an ethics but a history ; not a commandment but 
a record ; not a logical science but the jottings of 
the chance and wayward habits of unlettered men. 
For strange to say, language grows from beneath 
and not above. Speech is flexible and fluid at the 
lowest, not the highest levels. Educated people 
speak a printed language, and to print is to petrify. 
It will be curious to see whether printing and uni- 
versal education will so far standardize speech as to 
arrest the course of language change and growth. 
Such, at any rate, would be the logical and sorry 
outcome of a teaching policy which gave to grammar 

^ This criticism does not apply to some of the so-called language 
books now in use in, elementary education, but all too many of these 
show a lack of English scholarship which mars their excellent pedagogic 
method. 



68 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

rules the awful import of Mosaic law. Yet such a 
teaching policy is the inevitable result of the present 
placement of grammar in the grades. For at the 
point where teaching scholarship is lowest, and 
fetishism accordingly high, just there we essay the 
most abstruse and least developed of all sciences. 
The average teacher jeers at Johnny when he con- 
fuses drank and drunk or swam and swum, quite 
ignorant of the fact that most of his mistakes are 
not the product of his own carelessness but the 
lineal survivals in low-class speech of the original 
Anglo-Saxon correct verb forms and that "they drunk 
up all the water" — yes, even the up — is right good 
old English, and drank in the plural past historically 
a hideous mistake. The average grade school 
teacher knows nothing of Old or Middle or Shake- 
spearian English ; nothing of the queer ways of lan- 
guage growth and dialect amalgamation ; nothing of 
sound changes and phonetic laws. She knows noth- 
ing scientifically of Greek and Latin grammar, 
without which many common English constructions 
and idioms are blind puzzles. Yet with this meager 
equipment and with inadequate or illiterate texts, 
we ask her to teach the child the science of his 
mother tongue — a science at once beyond the 
teacher and unsuited to his age. 

Then must it be "no more of formal grammar in 
the common schools." We teach a foreign language 
by the natural method. How long before we shall 
adopt it with our own ? Again I say, speak, read, 
write, correct, and illustrate by grammatical expla- 



READING AND WRITING 69 

nations if you must. Let grammar be the by-product, 
the tool, the handmaid of speech and composition ; 
but away with set conjugations, parsings, and declen- 
sions in the lower schools. My own experience 
suggests that high school is soon enough to broach 
these mysteries ; that in high school they must be 
taught again even when they have been covered in 
the elementary course ; and that even among high 
school teachers with their more liberal training, there 
are few now fitted either in knowledge or in point 
of view, to make such study vital, reliable, and sig- 
nificant. 

But let us not be destructive only in our review 
of grade school subjects. What can we do with 
reading and writing to make of them a socializing 
force ? 

First comes the eternal problem of what we shall 
have our pupils read. Let them read to read, not 
to learn how. Let the reading lesson be always an 
end from the very start and not a means. Read 
aloud with them if they cannot understand alone ; 
and do not underestimate the capacity of little 
folks to like and understand the best. It has long 
been my theory, founded on my own experience, 
that the way to learn a foreign language is to lay 
hold of a good hard average book : a fat two-volume 
German novel, an up-to-date French romance, a 
play by D'Annunzio. The struggle is sharp and 
brief. Mastery comes. Vocabulary comes. The 
genius of the language grows familiar. The appetite 
is uncloyed by the mild pap of primers and easy 



70 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

readers on which the usual beginning class marks time. 
Then why not let the littlest children have whole 
books from the start in English too ; books adapted 
to their age and likes, but none the less fine, sound, 
meaty tales ; real books, not primers ; Mother Goose 
instead of A, B, C ; Robinson Crusoe and The Ara- 
bian Nights, Hiaw'atha and The Wonder Book instead 
of "words of one syllable"? Having discovered the 
value of a long period of development in evolving 
a higher type, we bid fair to prolong human infancy 
till a man just gets life well between his teeth as 
they drop from his gums. We protect the child 
from early work (too often even at home),^ from all 
responsible contact with the world which would 
mature his will and stimulate him to creative thought. 
His schooling is his major chance to grow in judg- 
ment and experience ; yet we train his school activi- 
ties upon a trellis of prescribed routine, anticipate, 
think, act for him at every turn and cut off his hope 
of all vicarious life by keeping him through the 
grades on merely juvenile or informatory reading. 

1 " Today child idleness is ten times as serious a problem as child la- 
bor. Our labor legislation has been too negative and not suflSciently 
constructive. We have a serious situation in this. Until recently, most 
of us were brought up under rural conditions and the farm furnished a 
discipline of life. We did things systematically and without protest in 
rain or shine. A farmer boy never forgets to milk the cows and he 
never says ' It is rainy and disagreeable ' and then stays in the house 
when he ought to feed the stock. This discipline of life begins very 
early. Now most of us are being brought up under urban conditions 
and lose that discipline of life which is essential to the formation of 
character. This is one reason for universal military service." 

— Richard T. Ely. 



READING AND WRITING 71 

Children come to the high school green, tender, 
flabby, unused to sustained attention and continu- 
ous work, unused to ideas, incapable of reading any- 
thing except short stories or endlessly repetitive 
Dotty Dimples, Little Colonels, or Frank Meriwethers. 
Memories still linger in my mind of Herculean 
struggles by bright and interested high school fresh- 
men to extract the simple plot from Ivanhoe, The 
Last of the Mohicans, or The Tale of Two Cities, 
struggles which showed an unwarrantable pauperi- 
zation of the children in the grades. For seven 
years, they had been robbed of their literary birth- 
right — the power to follow and appreciate a stir- 
ring tale stretching in time and place beyond the 
range of day-to-day experience. Books poorly 
chosen ; time spent on meager oral reading ; or lack 
of training in understanding reading was the thief. 
I have appended at the end of this volume a list 
of good books for children's reading, tried and tested 
in many homes and schools. Not every book in 
this list is adapted to every child at the indicated 
grade. And it is as much a mistake to go over as 
under pupils' heads. But why make a class list 
uniform and rigid ? Let every pupil read a different 
thing, unless you find a book that all will love and 
read and talk about and act out in play together. 
Do not object that unless the reading is uniform, 
you cannot conveniently examine the class upon its 
work. Courses should not be adapted to examina- 
tions but examinations to courses. Students study 
not even to learn but to grow, to grow in love for 



72 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

and power over things worth while, ennobling, and 
beautiful. 

In an early page of this chapter I said that children 
should read whole books in cheap but attractive 
library editions. A chapter might well be written 
on the printing and binding of school classics. How 
depressing are their cheap, dingy, and substantial 
covers ; their unmistakable textbook print and pa- 
per; their numeric annotations and compendious 
notes ! Should not a book be lovable for itself, a thing 
to keep and put upon a shelf and like to see ? The 
Everyman, the Burt, and the Crowell editions, 
despite faults of text and structure, still have 
worked a miracle in college English because they 
wear a reading, not a grinding, look. I have 
always used library editions for my high school 
classes when they could be found in well-printed 
cheap editions, even when they had no notes. Pupils 
will like them better ; keep them longer ; read them 
oftener. When some publisher does for grade 
school work what the Duttons have done for the 
field of college literature, a great advance will be 
possible in selecting likeable reading for the little 
folks as well. 

The actual teaching of a piece of literature in the 
grade school classroom could form the subject of a 
book much more extended than the present collec- 
tion of suggestive hints. How shall we present the 
given material so as to arouse interest and achieve 
understanding without killing it ? Here is the point 
where love and science meet. The laboratory method 



. READING AND WRITING 73 

of teaching literature, so late and so valuable a peda- 
gogic find, has the defect of becoming lifeless dissec- 
tion in the hands of an uninspired master. In 
order to avoid this pitfall, many instructors teach 
impressionistically, in exclamation points, reducing 
the recitation to a sort of collective quivering with 
enthusiasm. But the piece of reading must be 
understood before any valuable appreciation can 
be aroused, any appreciation that is more than a 
sentimental echo of the feelings of an idolized pre- 
ceptor. Other instructors go through a thing sen- 
tence by sentence, word by word, making sure that 
no detail escapes the student's observation, with 
the result of boredom and a lack of stimulus to 
further reading. What exactly shall we do in class 
and what expect pupils to do for themselves outside ? 
To find sufficiently meaty stuff for study and reci- 
tation is the problem of the elementary English 
teacher. Arithmetic is easy; there is the sum to 
work. Geography is easy ; there are the facts to 
memorize. In the teaching of high school and 
college English, this effort to find substantial sub- 
ject matter has resulted more and more in stress upon 
the history and background of literature at the ex- 
pense of real reading and literary appreciation. 
But literary history, even literary biography, essen- 
tial as both are to English scholarship, are not a 
substitute for learning how to read intelligently and 
with appetite. And literary history has no function 
in the grammar school. What then shall our grade 
school English classes do? 



74 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

First, read in long enough stretches to arouse 
interest. Do not discuss until a bulk of reading has 
been done, and then ask well-planned suggestive 
questions that will review the reading in extenso and 
detail. If you do not know how to ask questions 
about literature, The Teaching of Poetry in the High 
School by Professor Fairchild of the University of 
Missouri will give you a helpful start. Remember 
that you are training the pupil to observe and under- 
stand ; make him do both, and make him look ahead. 
Never trust to the inspiration of the moment for 
your questions. Have them ready. You can have 
the inspirations extra! And know just how many 
things you can cover in your class period, stick 
to essentials and get done. Plan so you will have 
time to give the pupils rein to ask questions and 
follow up their own lines of thought. But be sure 
to plan something of your own — and finish it on 
time. 

Suppose a class in the upper grades is just begin- 
ning Evangeline, Give them a bit of historical 
background. Read them the whole poem. Then 
ask them to tell the story. Next let them read the 
first part to themselves, and try to tell the main 
points alone. Then come your questions, so well 
woven into re-reading and class discussion that the 
child does not suspect a prepared lesson plan at all. 

1. What is the sad thought which occurs to 
Longfellow as he visits the primeval forest which 
once shaded the village of Grand Pre.f^ 

2. Describe the country around the village. 



READING AND WRITING 75 

3. Describe the way the houses were built. 

4. How did the people of the village spend their 
evenings in summer ? 

5 . How many things do you admire in Evangeline ? 

6. How do you think she spent her time ? Can 
you tell from the description of her father's house ? 

7. Tell the story of Evangeline's childhood. 

8. What time of year is it when the story opens ? 
How did you know.^^ 

9. Did you guess that the story was going to be 
sad ? Why ? How does Longfellow make you feel 
in sections II and III that calamity is coming to the 
village ? 

10. How does the story of the pearl necklace 
show the justice of God and the injustice of man? 

11. For what purpose had the notary come to 
Evangeline's house .^^ 

12. WHien Longfellow says the "stars blossomed," 
what does he mean and to what is he comparing 
the stars? 

13. What was the curfew ? Why did they cover 
the embers so carefully at night ? 

14. Why does it make the story so much sadder 
to have the betrothal feast of Evangeline and 
Gabriel come just before the meeting of the men at 
the church ? 

15. What was the royal commission the English 
officer brought ? Do you think he fulfilled the com- 
mand gladly ? Why ? 

16. How do the English come to be the governors 
of Acadia ? 



76 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

17. How do you think the people felt when they 
heard the command of the king? How did they 
show their feelings ? 

18. What had they done to deserve such punish- 
ment? 

19. Who quiets the crowd and how does he manage 
to do it? 

20. Where were the men of the village that 
night ? 

21. What is Evangeline doing? 

22. Describe the departure of the Acadians on 
the ships. Do you know of any such deportation 
of whole townships in recent times ? 

These and a hundred other questions ^ more or 
less minute will suggest themselves to the teacher 
clever at seizing the points necessary for understand- 
ing and liking the tale, and likely to be missed by 
the inexperienced reader. The great problem with 
little readers is to catch and fix attention. The 
great secret of later successful, rapid reading will be 
this power of rapid, mental fixation and observation. 
And in my considerable experience as a high school 
and college teacher, I have found a lack of such 
attentive observation the main stumbling point 
in the path of advanced English work. Too many 
pupils fail to see anything but words in what they 
read ; and this is largely because in the lower schools 
they have not been taught to look for meanings. 

^ See Briggs and Coffman : Reading in the Public Schools, for sugges- 
tions as to how to present a poem and as to the direction of the children's 
independent reading. (Chapter on Memorizing.) 



READING AND WRITING 77 

To liberalize literary taste then in the grammar 
school, we must drop the formal aspects of English 
teaching; select our reading more variously so as 
to keep within the range of childish interests, and 
yet stimulate to intellectual growth and effort ; and 
train the child from the first to a thorough appre- 
hension of the thing he reads. 

A second use of reading often resisted by teachers 
of English, since it seems to make literature a utili- 
tarian adjunct to other subjects, is letting the reading 
lesson open up new phases of life or fields of informa- 
tion. Literature must always be a tool to one means 
or another of a fuller life, and facts lie at the root 
of all our finer experience. ■ Could not reading, 
while remaining still a joyous art, be so planned as 
to equip the child with some of the knowledge neces- 
sary for a rudimentary understanding of our modern 
social and economic world ? Katherine Dopp in her 
treatise on The Place of Industries in Elementary 
Education, has described the repetition in childish 
development of the historical stages through which 
the human race has reached its present state of 
culture, and has suggested a use of these economic 
stages in school play and manual training. Under- 
standing social history is the first step toward under- 
standing society, for the sociologist and for the lay- 
man too ; and living social history in games and play 
and reading social history in their story books is 
laying the ground work of social intelligence for the 
growing child. Even the best grade school reading 
courses seem to be selected without niuch regard to 



78 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

development of subject matter or progressive inter- 
ests, but solely to attract children and fall within 
their comprehension. Teachers have said that this 
and this and this will be "nice" for the little tots 
to read, and an aimless niceness is the main feature 
of the resulting program. Yet could not suitable 
and attractive reading be selected which would 
retrace the steps of human progress and give the 
child both a liking for good reading and a story-book 
knowledge of evolution? 

The fundamentals of economic history and modern 
industrial organization have been outlined in a new 
experimental introduction to economics for the sev- 
enth grade, ^ as individual wants, community wants, 
land ownership, institutions, production of wealth, 
labor conditions, capital and labor, wages, coopera- 
tion, transportation, means of communication, social 
control, factories, and government. Are there not 
enough good story books which reproduce all these 
matters for the different stages in human history in 
terms that any child can understand ? As an intro- 
duction to thinking of the ways and means of life, 
of the actual economic basis of existence, the sheerly 
necessary individual wants, what is sounder or 
more fascinating than Robinson Crusoe, a tale which, 
read aloud together and re-read again and yet again 
alone, is for the most part well within the reach of 
second- and third-grade pupils. Why has this story 
held generation after generation of readers of all 

1 Elementary Social Science by Frank M. Leavitt and Edith Brown, 
The Macmiilan Company. 



READING AND WRITING 79 

ages, without emotional subtilty as it is ? Because 
it is a tale of struggle with fundamental obstacles, of 
ingenuity, and of action. The very chance of his 
environment makes of every most trivial human act 
a problem, a mystery, an achievement. Where 
shall Crusoe breakfast on the desert isle ? What a 
romance eating becomes under the circumstances ! 
Where shall he sleep ? What shall he wear ? How 
shall he tell the time ? All the things we take for 
granted in our modern city life are here stripped to 
the skeleton of the need they meet and the human 
toil it takes to produce them. Robinson Crusoe then, 
the English romance, the great English textbook of 
elementary economics, for our first long piece of 
reading. And what wonderful games the class can 
play with Crusoe's adventures as the text! What 
gorgeous shipwrecks ! What swimmings to land in 
the school pool! What caves of chairs and tables 
in the corner of the room or in the school garden! 
What hewing and building and rowing of boats! 
What planting of barley ! What tracking of Friday 
on the shore ! What combats with cannibals I What 
cocoanuts, and parrakeets, and apes a-gambol in the 
branches overhead ! How cheerfully in that troub- 
lous Crusoe epoch of my own existence, I should have 
done arithmetic problems involving the yield of his 
barley or the time of his captivity. How eagerly 
we should have studied the geography of the "can- 
nibal isles." How strenuously toiled to master alone 
the coveted text and tale, to read as often and as 
long as ever we should please! 



80 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

And for the changing community wants of suc- 
ceeding human epochs, there are a whole series of 
tales of great interest and historical value. For the 
little tots, the wealth of legend and folk lore. Then 
The Early Cave Men, The Tree Dwellers, and The 
Later Cave Men by Katherine Dopp and The Cave 
Boy of the Stone Age by Margaret Mclntyre. For 
more advanced yet still simple social life, there are 
Burton's Stories of the Indians of New England and 
better still Longfellow's Hiawatha. There are Haw- 
thorne's Wonder Book and Guerber's Story of the 
Greeks ; Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome and Lyt- 
ton's Last Days of Pompeii; The Story of Europe by 
Harding and Snodgrass ; King Arthur and His 
Knights by Warren ; Lanier's Boys^ Froissart; Scott's 
Ivanhoe; Harding's Story of England; Guerber's 
Story of the Thirteen Colonies ; and Cooper's sturdy 
if flamboyant tales of pioneers. For current life 
with its problems and ideals, there are Louisa 
Alcott's Little Women, Spyri's Heidi, The Man 
without a Country by Edward Everett Hale, Dick- 
ens' Christmas Carol, The Birds' Christmas Carol 
by Wiggin, Ouida's Dog of Flanders, London's Call 
of the Wild, and a score of other fine tales suitable for 
childish reading in the grades. And of a more didac- 
tic nature are the Lessons in Community and Na- 
tional Life^ now issued by the United States Bureau 
of Education in connection with the food adminis- 

^ Write to U. S. Bureau of Education for lists of prices and titles. 
These leaflets are in some cases rather heavy for direct reading by the 
class, but they will give the teacher numerous ideas for class discussions. 



READING AND WRITING 81 

tration and containing material suitable either for 
oral or written composition. There seems scant 
reason why when the student finishes his grade 
school reading course, he should not have stored 
within his brain the great facts of human growth and 
the substructure of a lively social consciousness. 

All this time we have said little of the social role 
of writing in the public school. Yet writing can 
play a leading part — to fix in the child's mind what 
he has read, to formulate the things of interest he 
has seen on trips from school to market, factory, 
slum district, store, or countryside, and to describe 
the interesting and significant details in his own 
daily life of whose existence or importance he has 
perhaps been unconscious. The proportions already 
assumed by this chapter preclude a full discussion 
of the method of teaching composition in the lower 
schools.^ But a hint may be given as to its direc- 
tion into channels which will make for a better under- 
standing of our complex modern world. How my 
mother spends her day. What my father does every 
day. What the servants do at our house. What I do 
every day. What is the street cleaner doing and why ? 
What is a policeman ? Why does the doctor come 
every week to school ? Where does the grocer get 
his vegetables ? What becomes of the wheat we 
raise on our farm.^^ Who made my new suit of 

^ See Appendix II for a list of references on the teaching of the sentence, 
the unit which of course forms the natural basis of elementary school 
work, and whose proper presentation will obviate the necessity of formal 
grammar in the grades, 
G 



82 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

clothes ? What are the parks for ? Why papa pays 
rent for our house. Where does our water come 
from ? Who owns the street in front of my house ? 
What is there under the paving in our front street ? 
What do I pay for with my car fare ? How many 
things do we eat at our house that mamma didn't 
cook ? Why papa pays taxes. Here is only a half 
start down the avenue of limitless possibilities of 
socialized writing in the common school. 

But directing the pupils' attention through their 
written work to the economic and civic problems of 
modern life is but a fraction of the social duty of 
the composition teacher. In fact, language itself 
must grow interesting ; self-expression must be made 
a vital part of living ; and speaking and writing must 
become spontaneous play, if composition is to be the 
stimulus for successful spelling study, if making 
sentences is to replace grammatical analysis, and 
if theme topics, no matter how socially important, 
are to be more than a stupid bugbear to write on 
which is but to hate. I have said that my own 
teaching experience proves that public school pupils 
write and talk better than they read. But I repeat 
the statement with many misgivings, and with the 
sorry addition that they like to read much better 
than they like to write or deliver oral themes in class. 
This is largely because in the lower schools, composi- 
tion work has been made a set exercise and not a 
means of vital self-expression. The successful grade 
school teacher will seldom use the word "composi- 
tion" to her class, nor will she hold a regular, formal 



READING AND WRITING 83 

composition lesson; she will create a situation in 
which the pupils will be eager to express their ideas, 
orally if there is time for all, on paper if there is 
not, or if a more permanent record is desired. Such 
situations will be seen to abound in school life, if we 
can only get away from fixed schedules and composi- 
tion textbooks as a source of subject matter ^ and turn 
to the day-to-day interests of the children. 

If we expect to get the spirit of play in composition 
work and make the children want to talk, we must 
find topics about which the child has strong desires, 
subjects, as Klapper points out, like "Shall we have a 
relay race or a ring game at recess ?" or "What kind 
of dog I want for a pet." One of the great diffi- 
culties encountered by teachers both in oral and 
written composition is getting the child to forget 
himself and let himself go on the subject. The 
trouble lies in making the child self-conscious at the 
start ; he will not think of himself at all, but only of 
the subject if the situation (of which the teacher 
expects composition to be a by-product) can only 
arise spontaneously and contain the elements of 
vital interest and discussion. Such situations often 
grow out of ordinary schoolroom studies and the 
pupils can easily be got to talk or even write if 
questions are asked by the teacher which call for, 
not mere reproduction of subject matter studied, 
but discussion of it from a new point of view, 
demanding imaginative thought on the part of the 

^ An English textbook is all too often a crutch for a lazy or unin- 
ventive teacher. 



84 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

pupil. ^ Often there is a chance to vitaKze the study of 
history or geography by the play of the imagination 
in constructing the supposed details of some scene 
or situation. The value of descriptive guessing 
games for furnishing topics for oral or written compo- 
sition is incalculable. The instinct for communi- 
cation, the desire to share interesting information 
or tell a story, is susceptible of endless exploitation 
by the skillful composition teacher in the grades. 
Here appears one great value of diversified class 
reading as against the constant employment of the 
uniform group method. Children love, also, to be 
given the opening sentence or situation in a narrative 
and then be left to complete the story. They will 
write letters with interest since they can see that let- 
ters are to play a vital part in their later life and since 
a letter seems so much more communicative than a 
mere ** composition." Versification, too, has great 
charm for little folks, especially when it takes the 
form of imitation or of setting words to familiar 
tunes. All these devices help to make composition 
work, whether oral or written, a fascinating part 
of the pupil's play life, which is after all his most real 
life, and to develop his joy in and power of self- 
expression. And gradually through a skillful em- 
phasis upon the thought units of their informal 
composition,^ the teacher will build up a sense of 

1 See Charters' Teaching the Common Branches, chapters on reading, 
language work, and composition in the grades. 

2 See Mahoney's Standards in English, World Book Company, Yonkers, 
N. Y., for material on building up the sentence sense. See also Klapper's 
Teaching of English, Appleton, New York City. 



READING AND WRITING 85 

unity, thought relation, sentence structure (the term 
is immaterial, call this fundamental grammatical 
principle what we will, the thing remains the same) 
which will emancipate us from the necessity of 
grammar drill; keep composition out of the realm 
of drudgery and formal exercise ; and give it to the 
grade school sociologist as a medium through which 
the child's observation of the world can be sharp- 
ened and focused and his knowledge systematized 
and molded into a socially useful tool. 



IV 

SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 

The history of curricula shows a curious rhythm ; 
it is a spiral, returning on itself, yet mounting up- 
ward. Subjects of study are introduced because 
they have an urgent practical application; people 
learn to teach them; specialists in them appear; 
departments are created. Then through some freak 
of progress, their practical utility is lost. The world 
invents a new process ; the subject is no longer 
needed in the curriculum. But its trained teachers 
remain attached to the specialty, reluctant or un- 
able to take up a new line of work. The older 
generation, too, having itself mastered this branch 
of learning, fondly imagine it to be necessary to a 
liberal education. Then it is we begin to hear that 
the subject, though no longer practical, has great 
pedagogic value. It is a mental discipline, a drill, 
a gymnastic ; it toughens intellectual fiber ; it trains 
the mind in logical processes ! Its very impractical- 
ity is cited as a point in its favor ; it is an exercise in 
abstract and general truth! Such subjects are the 
grammars of dead languages, once invaluable when 
science, theology, and the arts turned largely to 
classical sources ; now useful mainly to the historian 

86 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 87 

and literary scholar. Such a subject is higher mathe- 
matics when required of the average college student 
undestined for a technical career. Such are many 
branches of elementary mathematics, like partial 
payments and annual interest in arithmetic, of infre- 
quent application in the business world but long 
retained in textbooks because their method was 
cumbersome, and diflScult ; because they made such 
laboriously good problems! Indeed, a great part 
of arithmetic as it is still set forth in grade school 
texts and taught in many and many a school, 
shows this withdrawal from utility and academization 
into abstract processes. 

But the spiral is returning on itself. Arithmetic, 
in order to be teachable, is made practical anew, ap- 
plied to actual objects, related to the pupil's experi- 
ence or to his future occupational needs. In the 
lower schools, we now teach arithmetic by the object 
method and construct "local" problems to replace 
the cut-and-dried matter of the text ; in our secondary 
institution, we introduce shop geometry and algebra, 
mill arithmetic, practical accounting, and the like. 
But excellent as are the results of these practical 
improvements, the possibilities of mathematics as 
a social study have been little developed or appre- 
ciated. Mathematics is the tool by which we 
measure, divide, and master the facts of life. It 
represents in skeleton outline, the framework of 
the world. It is coterminous with human activity. 
Hence to study applied mathematics is to study 
society. Yet the steps forward already taken in 



88 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

the teaching of mathematics have seldom been made 
with recognition of this fact. In a current peda- 
gogic journal, the author of a valuable practical 
article on the teaching of grade school arithmetic 
speaks of establishing a closer relation "between 
the problems of life and the problems of arithmetic" 
as though they were somehow different, as though a 
problem would exist "in arithmetic" except as it 
had arisen in the course of life. This same author in 
his further discussion of concrete local problem 
material, thinks always of choosing problems to 
illustrate "arithmetical principles" and not of using 
arithmetic to master human difficulties. Indeed, 
the practicalizing of arithmetic in the lower grades 
still aims largely at facilitating instruction in proc- 
esses regarded as ends useful in themselves and not 
for the social context of their application. The 
Longan method of primary arithmetic, revolution- 
izing as it did the teaching of decimals and fractions, 
telescoping incredibly the time required for their 
mastery, dropping into the second and third grade 
what had dragged unsatisfactorily through the fourth 
and even the fifth, minimizing the labor of instruc- 
tion, increasing the enjoyment of the pupils and 
developing their powers of logical analysis — even 
this educational departure, beyond whose funda- 
mental idea few American schools have far progressed, 
meant not so much an application of arithmetic to 
life processes as its application to concrete visible 
objects. It is designed to make arithmetic easier, 
not more valuable. It contains the method but not 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 89 

the idea of a socialized study, of an arithmetic which 
will both be teachable and concrete, and also, by 
its relation to the situations in life where its use is 
obviously natural and necessary, not only prepare 
the student for its practical application but lead him 
on to a clearer understanding of the world of which 
these situations are a part. 

The object and the local problem are the starting 
point for all vital teaching of arithmetic; let us see 
then the type of local problem in which pupils will 
be interested and which can serve as a starting 
point for our new socialized arithmetic. Best of all 
will be the competitive game involving imitation of 
the grown-up world. TSuch is the familiar game of 
playing store, which is capable of many degrees of 
complication between simple buying for pennies by 
the first-grade pupil and the more intricate form 
adapted to the teaching of rapid addition and sub- 
traction in decimals, in which one child plays the 
role of storekeeper, one is delivery boy, and the 
others are housekeepers, calling the store by 'phone, 
inquiring the prices of commodities, making an order, 
and then paying the delivery boy who brings the 
goods. The storekeeper must prepare an itemized 
bill and add it up ; so must the housekeeper. These 
must agree, and the delivery boy must make change. 
Whoever first sees and corrects an error becomes 
delivery boy. This game is played with real money 
and real commodities sold at current prices and is a 
never-ending source of practice and delight. It is 
teaching by objects, and not only by concrete ob- 



90 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

jects, but by familiar objects reproducing an enter- 
taining situation within the child's experience. 
But it has no great social value; it is a mere peda- 
gogic lubricative device. However, suppose for an 
instant that the pupils ask why potatoes cost so- 
and-so much. Here is the chance to make arith- 
metic lead out into the economic world and explain 
that world to the child in terms that he can under- 
stand. 

"Where do potatoes come from.^^" you ask. 

"Out of the ground or out of a garden," some one 
replies. 

"Where are the gardens?" 

"They are in the country." 

"Who raises them.^" 

"The farmer." 

"How does the groceryman get the potatoes from 
the farmer?" 

"The farmer brings them to town in his wagon." 

"But suppose he lives too far away?" 

"Then they come on the train." 

"Are they brought straight to the grocer?" 

"No — they go to the market or to the whole- 
sale dealer and the grocer buys them there." 

"What does the grocer pay the wholesaler ? Why 
is it different from what the grocer charges us? 
What does the wholesaler pay the farmer ? Why is 
this different from the wholesale price ? Why does 
the farmer ask this much for potatoes?" 

"Because it costs to raise them." 

"Well — what?" 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 91 

Here arises an interesting series of calculations 
involving land, labor, seed, machinery, fertilizer, 
taxes, and a living profit. If there is a school garden 
or if the students have home gardens, the problem 
is acutely interesting and very simple. Or inquiries 
at the grocer's as to the origin of his supplies and 
trips to the country to see farms and truck gardens 
are often possible. Here is matter for countless 
inquiries, games, and arithmetical calculations. Here 
is the whole economic problem of agricultural pro- 
duction and exchange, of land, labor, and capital, 
cast in so simple a form that very young children 
indeed can master it. Here is a basic lesson in the 
social interdependence of the modern world; and 
how strikingly would this be true if some article of 
foreign trade were brought into discussion! And 
here is a chance to view life in terms of processes and 
not just of finished articles; to see the beginning, 
the middle, and the end of a phenomenon of which 
we usually catch but a fragmentary glimpse; to 
give the child logical wholes and not disjointed 
scraps of life. If you are dealing with a country 
child, you have only to reverse the process. Manu- 
facture, mining, cattle raising, shipping, real estate, 
and public utilities — all the economic structure of 
our common life — could thus be penetrated through 
the gateway of applied arithmetic. Starting with 
the competitive game, not a mere "made up" game 
but one imitative of social processes, the child ar- 
rives at arithmetical ability and a concept of the 
modern world. 



92 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

How little of such social background is so far 
found in the average grade school textbook in 
arithmetic ! Largely concerned with mensuration as 
elementary arithmetic must be, we have a series of 
juggling with pecks and pints in limbo, with paper 
areas, with supposititious paintings, paperings, car- 
petings (horrible dictu in these days of sanitation !) 
and pavings! To the genius of the teacher is left 
relating all these matters to the common life, and 
constructing the local material for her classroom use. 
Yet to the imaginative, socially conscious instructor, 
how rich a field for neighborhood and community 
study ! Paving alone furnishes a text on comraunity 
cooperation and interdependence, on municipal 
economy — and on the estimation of areas ! To 
play tax assessor while the rest of the class represent 
holders of real estate of different types is a joyous ex- 
pression of the quite human instinct for domination, 
an excellent drill in percentages, an open gateway 
into discussions of one sort of civic responsibility. 
Does your community depend for transportation 
upon electric trolleys ? What is the trackage ? 
What the daily carry? How many cars? What 
their capacity ? What is the fare and why ? Where 
does the water come from in your town ? How big 
is the reservoir ? How large are the pipes ? What 
is the flow? What is the meter rate and why? 
How much water does your family use every day if 
your monthly bill is so-and-so much ? The ordinary 
economic life of a community bristles with such 
"open sesames " into social arithmetic. And extraor- 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 93 

dinary situations like current war taxes will not 
escape the alert instructor. What is the nightly 
attendance at motion picture shows in your town ? 
How much will the government reap in taxes on 
each night's performance? What will it do with 
this money? What are the shipping needs of our 
Allies in this present military crisis? How many 
ships have they afloat? How many are the sub- 
marines sinking month by month? How fast are 
we replacing them in our shipbuilding yards ? How 
many tons of shipping must we have to supply so- 
and-so many soldiers at the front with food and 
equipment and ammunition? How many soldiers 
are there now in training camps in this country ? 
If they are all sent to France, how many ships 
must be transferred to the war department service 
to carry them; to keep them furnished with sup- 
plies ? How many cars of such and such capacity 
will it take to move these soldiers to the sea coast, 
sitting two in a seat ? Sitting three in a seat ? If 
there is baggage transportation for so-and-so many 
pounds of military luggage, how much will each 
soldier be able to take to France ? If the average 
life of an aeroplane motor at the Front is one hun- 
dred hours, and the average speed is so-and-so 
many miles an hour, how many motors will an avi- 
ator exhaust in making several trips of various dis- 
tances? The food problem is capable of similar 
exploitation. 

Is it fantastic furthermore to imagine arithmetic 
being taught not process by process but situation 



94 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

by situation, even industry by industry, introduc- 
ing the child gradually to the whole fabric of our 
economic life ? What a world of romance in figures 
there would be! Could the class not pass as a 
whole from trade to trade as the arithmetical 
processes characteristic of each were mastered and 
exhausted? Commerce and banking for addition, 
multiplication, division, and per cents ; real estate, 
agriculture, interior decorating, paving, and the like 
for plane mensuration; building, construction, en- 
gineering, and mining for the cubes — we might 
multiply indefinitely the possibilities of arithmetical 
manipulation of topics of vital civic and national 
interest to grown-ups and children too. But this 
much must here serve as illustration. A suggestive 
topical summary of the various aspects of our modern 
social and industrial world which might be opened 
up for childish exploration through the gateway of 
arithmetic, together with the type of problem that 
can be used in each connection and the point of de- 
parture into the special subject through games or 
class study and discussion, will be found in the ap- 
pendix.^ 

There is, however, one connection in which arith- 
metic may be used to develop social habits, which has 
at this present writing a peculiar interest. It has 
become a truism to remark that the American na- 
tional vice is thriftlessness. Indeed, except for a 
heightened social and national consciousness, a 
livelier sense of ideal values and a willingness to 

^ See Appendix III. 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 95 

sacrifice for the ideal, the most cheering thought 
which the frightful international calamity of the Great 
War leaves the American observer is that perhaps the 
United States will learn to husband its resources, to 
think ahead, individually and collectively, to reculti- 
vate the old virtue of thrift, of saving, of capital- 
izing, by which men have risen in nature from the 
precarious level of the beast to their present position 
of security and dominance. 

We have been an extravagant race beyond the 
dreams of most barbaric wastefulness, extravagant 
from the millionaire at the top to the tramp at 
the bottom. There have been many reasons for 
this extravagance. Of course there were our seem- 
ingly limitless natural resources. But more 
basic and insidious is the indirect character of 
modern spending. A commercial age is naturally 
enough marked by this importance of money in 
daily life. Formerly we got things directly by our 
own labor or by that of the other members of our 
family. The fathers actually raised the food crop, 
the meat, the leather, the cotton, flax, and wool. 
The mother cooked and dried and cured and spun 
and wove and fabricated finished garments. The 
father made the shoes by hand at home of winter 
nights. The men folks of the family even made a 
large proportion of their tools themselves. But 
now we do not raise our own food and produce our 
own clothes. We work for some one else to earn 
money to buy food, shelter, and clothing. We are 
careful enough of the things we produce by our own 



96 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

labor directly. But money is an impersonalized 
agent. The toil it represents is not visible in the 
coin. Of money, we are not so thrifty. Yet of 
money we have need to be thrifty indeed, for in 
these days of indirect purchase, upon money and 
our ability not only to earn it but to save it and to 
spend it well, depend our comfort, well-being, and 
happiness. Of money it is harder to be thrifty 
than of labor and things ; yet of money we have 
need to be more thrifty since the average modern 
individual is incapable of satisfying his needs directly 
by creating food, clothing, and shelter by his own 
labor. 

Combined with these fundamental causes of 
American thriftlessness are a general absence of 
training at home and at school as to the value of 
money and the proper balance of expenditures. The 
low wages of labor has been also a source of thrift- 
lessness. Large numbers of people never have 
enough money to provide for their necessities and 
hence they never learn to plan ahead. Sickness 
and accident, sweeping away the hard-won savings 
of a struggling family and leaving them oftentimes 
dependent on charity in spite of all their efforts, 
are further discouragements to thrifty habits. And 
the marginal laborer v/ho, save as he may, will 
never be able to amass enough to keep clear of 
dependence in his old age — is it any wonder that 
such persons ask, "What is the use since the end is 
the same?" Without hope as an incentive, how 
dreary a thing after all can penny counting be! 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 97 

Yet these causes for American thriftlessness are one 
and all added reasons for thrift. And on the 
school teacher must fall, as always, the task 
of supplementing the lacks in home and public life 
which make of thriftlessness our national sin. 

It is a pedagogic maxim that the training of chil- 
dren should be incidental and indirect. And where 
in the school curriculum can incidental thrift instruc- 
tion enter more naturally and easily than in upper- 
grade arithmetic? In spite of the yalue of school 
savings banks and the purchase of thrift stamps and 
the like, it is inevitable that work for the younger 
children must be largely done through the fathers 
and mothers in Parent-Teacher associations. This 
is scarcely the place to enlarge upon the possibilities 
and methods of educating the parents through open 
programs and discussions ; but the skillful teacher- 
members of such associations can do much to arouse 
them to the need of training children to spend and 
save intelligently.^ The value of the ownership of 
objects capable of exploitation; the importance of 
a regular allowance for even the smallest school 
child ; the fact that the parent owes the child an al- 
lowance just as he owes the child any other necessity 
of life or training, such as food, clothing, shelter, 
education, or discipline ; the objection to irregular 
gifts of money with their accompanying irresponsi- 
bility, since the child, never having a certain amount 
to go upon, never learns to plan his expenditures and 

^ See Kirkpatrick on The Use of Money, an excellent, simple discussion 
of the subject. 

H 



98 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

deny himself (the denying being all done for him by 
others !) ; the fact that an allowance must be large 
enough for self-respect but not large enough to buy 
everything the child wants, so that he may learn to 
choose and evaluate; the necessity of inflexibility 
in making the child keep within the allowance, of 
absolute refusal to supplement the sum by casual 
gifts ; the matter of what the child shall do with this 
money of his own, whether he shall be required to 
replace, in part at least, damage to property, buy 
Christmas gifts, pay church and club dues, purchase 
necessities like pencils, paper, slates, hair-ribbons, 
etc., or whether it shall be used wholly for personal 
indulgences; the question of how the purchase of 
such necessities shall be gradually intrusted more 
and more to the child as the size of his allowance is 
increased ; the necessity of giving the child absolute 
freedom in expenditure within the prescribed limits 
so that he may learn by his mistakes ; the question 
of paying children for work they do at home and of 
what they shall be required to do without pay; the 
fact that children should be paid the actual value 
of a piece of work, no more, no less ; the worth of re- 
quiring a child to keep at least for a specified time 
an itemized account of his expenditure ; the impor- 
tance of talking over family affairs before the chil- 
dren to some extent and letting them see how the 
father and mother plan and balance their expenditure 
— here are only a few topics which the alert primary 
teacher will introduce into the Parent-Teacher pro- 
gram on The Children's Money and Its Use, 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 99 

But for the older children, vital work in arithmetic 
will teach the principles and methods of practical 
thrift. Planning the school garden and keeping 
accounts ; estimating the cost of the dishes prepared 
in the cooking class and consumed in the lunch 
room ; make-believe enterprises ; estimation of the 
cost of school repairs, and municipal improvements ; 
the keeping of personal accounts and finally in the 
upper grades, the actual teaching of the family 
budget system ^ will be a long step forward in the 
inculcation of thrift habits, of thoughtful control 
of material environment. The idea of the budget 
system, for some time in use in progressive business 
and up-to-date educational institutions, is just be- 
ginning to penetrate the foggy region of municipal 
finance.^ County, state, and national expenditures 
where political pull and special influence now reign 
as deciding factors instead of economy and necessity, 
will undoubtedly, under the pressure of popular dis- 
content at rising taxes, be brought under the same 
enlightening regime. But the average home pre- 
sents a situation of financial chaos ; an almsgiving 
husband; a crumbpicking wife; and a lack of intel- 
ligence and balance of expenditure naturally follow- 

1 Especially easy to introduce if there is training in domestic science. 

2 Perhaps for the upper grades, a study of the municipal budget, of 
the general school budget, and of ^the sub-budget for the particular school 
might be introduced into arithmetic work. If there is some improvement 
which the children particularly desire for their school, it will furnish 
motivation for such a budget scrutiny ; and if the pupils are allowed to 
make estimates for their new improvement and lay their case before the 
Board of Education in person, interest will rise to the nth power. 



100 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

ing upon indefiniteness and irresponsibility. To lay 
a foundation for a more rational domestic finance 
will be the function of the arithmetic teacher who 
presents, quite as a matter of course, problems based 
on the partnership idea of a family budget made out 
by a man and wife deliberately dividing their total 
income into fixed proportional sums for reinvestment 
and saving, for food, rent, and household furnish- 
ings, clothing, household labor, fuel, education of 
self and children, medical attention, recreation, 
carfare, children's allowance, and the rest. 

The value of such training in family budgets, 
while not by any means confined to the girls, is 
particularly great in their case since women are the 
spenders of the nation. We hear often that the 
hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules 
the world ; but it is much more immediately true 
that the hand that spends the world's money does 
the ruling. It happens to be the same hand, to be 
sure, and it ought to be comparatively easy, once 
we recognize the obligation, to teach girls to think 
as they spend that by their choice of purchases, they 
are helping to decide whether their money shall sup- 
port workers in good conditions at educative work 
or in bad conditions at degrading work; whether 
they will buy the labor of women in the sweat 
shops of the east, of children in a southern cotton 
mill, or of pallid girls toiling to exhaustion for a 
few pennies a day in the silk factories of new Japan. 
Of course we do not deliberately say when we go 
into a department store to purchase a costly fabric. 



SOCIAL ARITHMETIC 101 

"I am determined that a girl shall sit day after 
day for twelve long hours at her loom." But that 
is often what we accomplish by our spending and 
that is a very easy thing to teach pupils when start- 
ing out from the basis of a budget system or even 
of personal accounts to plan a proper and intelligent 
balance of expenditures.^ 

It is idle to hope that consumers will take the 
trouble either individually or collectively to ascer- 
tain as they buy the conditions under which each 
article they purchase was produced, and then boy- 
cott those industries whose labor conditions are 
unsatisfactory. Prices are no indication of either 
wages or working conditions ; and other informa- 
tion is too hard to get. Demand can seldom be 
mobilized completely and continuously enough to 
affect materially methods of production. But con- 
sumers, when once thoroughly aroused to their 
responsibility for the lives of the workers whom 
their money — however indirectly — hires, find out 

* In the following books will be found information as to the methods 
by which various commodities are manufactured, which can be utilized 
by the teacher in giving instruction on the ethics of spending and in 
arousing quite young students to a sense of responsibility for the condi- 
tions under which the things they use are made. The Path of Labor, 
Council of Women for Home Missions, New York City; Carpenter, 
How the World Is Fed, How the World Is Clothed, and How the World Is 
Housed, American Book Co., New York City; Women Workers of the 
Orient and Old Peoples at New Tasks, Student Volunteer Movement, 25 
Madison Avenue, New York City; U. S. Bureau of Labor, Industrial 
Accidents and Hygiene Series 1-16; Dublin, Causes of Death by Occupa- 
tion, Washington, Gov. Printing Office; Kober, Diseases of Occupa- 
tion and Vocational Hygiene, Blakiston's Son & Co., Philadelphia. 



102 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

the simpler, easier, surer way to safeguard the human 
beings whom they ask to toil for them in field or 
mine or factory or store.^ That we may shop at 
ease, getting the things we wish and knowing our 
money buys not misery, but life and health and 
happiness, there must be laws that say how men 
shall work and where and when, and what they 
shall be paid. It is the part of the teacher to create 
a demand for such laws by making her pupils feel 
the intricate interdependence of the whole social 
fabric, and our consequent responsibilities. A little 
dropping will wear away a stone. An idea rooted 
becomes a governing force. The uneasy conscience 
of the spending public results at length in labor 
legislation. 

Thus through game and problem, through inci- 
dental question and explanation, may arithmetic 
be made to penetrate the whole structure of social 
life and draw its outlines for the rising generation. 

^ As labor legislation triumphs in Europe and America, unscrupulous 
capital, interested in short-time profits, has already begun to build 
factories in Asia and Africa, where cheap labor and raw materials are 
at hand, and employers are as yet unmolested by laws or unions in 
their exploitation. It is thus necessary for the consumer of the future 
to develop a long-distance imagination and conscience if he is to fulfill 
his social responsibility toward labor. 



V 

HISTORY 

In the teaching of history, the social education 
of the future finds its best ally. No subject so lends 
itself to the interpretation of the modern social and 
industrial organization; no subject so awakens na- 
tional consciousness and vigorous national spirit; 
and no subject so surely widens the horizon and 
prepares the mind for a broader view of human 
destiny, for a "parliament of nations, a federation 
of the world." Yet its vast social resources are 
only now beginning to be tapped in non-collegiate 
education. In our colleges and universities, the 
military and political view of history, with its text- 
book chronologies of reigns and battles and its por- 
trait gallery of splendid heroes, has long been replaced 
by a study of history as a laborious human growth, 
an evolution of institutions, a ferment of ideas and 
social forces, a phenomenon in which kings and gen- 
erals are only the foam on the crest of the wave, only 
the hand or tool of gigantic movements welling up 
from the economic and social base of any given civ- 
ilization. This conception has found its way into 
high school teaching in many and many an excellent 
text like West's Ancient History and Robinson's 

103 



104 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

now almost classic History of Western Europe. And 
the methods of many a high school instructor are 
bent upon making his students understand the 
development rather than memorize the picturesque 
events of human history. But comparatively little 
has yet been done to socialize the teaching of history 
in the elementary schools. 

Indeed there is grave doubt in the minds of 
many educators as to the feasibility of such social- 
ization. No one who follows the excellent teaching 
of history now done in our up-to-date secondary insti- 
tutions can fail to perceive that the gains have been 
accompanied by very definite and obvious losses. 
The average high school senior can tell you with 
glibness and considerable real intelligence what was 
the course of thought in a given epoch, what were 
its causes in contemporary economic and social 
conditions, and what were its influences upon insti- 
tutional development. He no longer talks of kings, 
generals, lawgivers, and statesmen; he talks of 
social forces. He no longer talks of King Arthur 
and the Round Table, but of the land tenure and 
the feudal system. He no longer talks of Luther, 
but of the Reformation. In becoming social, his- 
tory has ceased to be biographical. In ceasing to 
be biographical, it has ceased to be vivid. In ex- 
plaining life, we have ceased to describe it. In 
talking about movements, we have forgotten indi- 
viduals. But all the world knows that a child, like 
a poet, loves an individual better than a movement 
and a tale better than an explanation. And the 



HISTORY 105 

younger the child, the more true this maxim is. 
Do high school students read their new scientific 
histories with the thrill our fathers got from Plutarch, 
Prescott, and Macaulay? 

A great deal has been done, it is true, to render 
the new scholarship picturesque and to keep the 
story quality in history. Historical fiction has 
succeeded to fictional history and its results are by 
no means despicable though usually quite second 
rate. Nevertheless, we must admit that we have 
ripened our methods faster than we have ripened 
our high school students ; and that the scientific 
study of history has not been as yet successfully 
adapted to secondary education. Therefore when 
it is proposed to carry the point of view of social 
interpretation into the grammar grades as well, 
the skeptic looks upon the proposal with a certain 
quite justified suspicion. 

The fact remains, however, that the study of 
history is valuable just because it does serve to 
explain the course of human evolution. Not only 
is it The Great Tale, The Universal Fiction whose 
Author transcends in imagination, in plot structure, 
and in gripping interest all human novelists, but 
it is the touchstone by which we understand our 
world and judge the worth or danger in this and 
that aspect of contemporary life. Thus since the 
majority of our pupils receive in the grades their 
only education, it is most of all imperative that in 
the grades, history should be so taught as to give the 
pupil some notion of the great stages in human 



106 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

progress ; of the trend of social evolution ; of the 
origin, growth, and present nature of our social, eco- 
nomic, and political institutions; and of the origin 
and history of the great nations of the world, their 
respective contributions to culture, and the funda- 
mental unity of their higher interests and aims. As 
a preparation for the cooperative world organization 
of which we dream, each American boy and girl 
must be made to see that modern civilization has 
swept away the old boundaries and separatisms 
which we once knew ; that we live in a world which is 
one, economically, socially, and politically ; that what 
happens to one individual happens to all the human 
race ; and that there is no life, no hope, no progress 
possible for men and women in the future that is 
not a free and democratic international progress 
forward together. 

But how can such a task be achieved in seven 
short years and with the youthful students of our 
grammar schools ? Needless to say, exhaustive 
historical knowledge cannot be achieved, nor can 
we expect of mere children any profound philosophy 
of history. But by the well-trained grammar school 
instructor, the groundwork can at least be laid, 
and certain raw materials for historical intelligence 
can be presented in such a way that the pupils' sub- 
sequent thinking will be in the right direction and 
that they will perhaps be able later on to work out 
for themselves a rudimentary but sound political 
philosophy. The grade school is the place for 
narrative. Let the child hear and see the magic 



HISTORY 107 

tale. But let the teacher understand and select 
so that this factual narrative will contain the in- 
formation necessary for understanding the national 
and world problems our future citizens may be 
called upon to meet.^ 

And where shall we begin our story? Where 
history and literature begin, in the folk legend and 
the fairy tale, in the mythology of ancient civiliza- 
tion, in the history of strange old peoples, of the 
Hindoos, the Chinese, the Assyrians and Hebrews, 
the Egyptians and Phoenicians, the Greeks and the 
Romans — nations whose story has for the child a 
congenial directness and simplicity; nations whose 
early art has for him an understandable and imitable 
quaintness ; nations whose life, manners, and legends 
furnish rich material for his dramatic play.^ Then 
come the days of feudalism and chivalry which appeal 
so strongly to the boy of ten or twelve, stories of 
vigorous action, of bravery, of devotion, of dawning 
social order and national awakening. And then 
the political era, with its national rivalries, its class 
struggles, its colonial enterprises, its bursting energy 
and dramatic conflicts. And last and most precious, 
our own American history, a thrilling chapter in 
that drama of freedom of which the whole world 
supplies the text. But let us remember that Amer- 

1 Note that this plan throws upon the normal school the duty of 
training elementary teachers far more thoroughly than heretofore in 
history. 

2 See Greek Photo Plays for children by Effie Seachrest, Rand Mc- 
Nally, a set of suggestive dramatizations of Greek myths for use with 
third and fourth grades. 



108 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

ica is after all only a chapter. Why do we teach 
our children our own Colonial history as though 
there could have been a Patrick Henry on this side 
the Atlantic without a William Pitt or an Edmund 
Burke upon the other ? As though our own Revolu- 
tion were a thing apart and not merely a phase of 
that larger Anglo-Saxon struggle for self-government, 
which in turn is part of a world drama greater still ? 
Britain, America, France, Italy, Greece, Russia, per- 
haps one day Germany — here is the grand continued- 
in-our-next serial of democracy, whose vivid outlines 
will hold the youthful reader to the end and bind all 
nations in the circle of a common development. 

Not only the sweep of political thought but the 
growth and change of social and industrial institu- 
tions can be best brought home to the child by the 
intelligently guided study of history. In another 
chapter, we have seen the next steps in industrial 
progress and the difl&culties in the way of industrial 
peace. Only historical perspective can take the 
bitterness from our economic conflict ; only historical 
perspective can make labor patiently constructive; 
only historical perspective can reconcile capital to 
democratic change. But except for the mechanical 
evolution of transportation, grade school teaching 
has scarcely touched upon industrial history. We 
need to rewrite our textbooks for the lower schools, 
as indeed we are rapidly doing in these days, so 
as to present pictorially to the child the actual world 
in whose midst historical events took place, the ac- 
tual daily life and work of the people in other times 



HISTORY 109 

than ours. Thus by comparison, he will recognize 
for the first time contemporary usages and insti- 
tutions, and see their significance by tracing their 
origin in other modes of life. 

Professor Leavitt, formerly of the University of 
Chicago, worked out with his classes in the School 
of Education an ingenious plan for rewriting Ameri- 
can history to bring out those points necessary for 
social intelligence.^ History, according to Dr. Leav- 
itt, is merely the account of how men have satisfied 
their personal and community wants in each suc- 
cessive epoch. These wants are satisfied through 
production, involving land, labor, capital, and man- 
agement; and their satisfaction is governed by 
three principles regulative of human action : personal 
rights or freedom, property rights or ownership, 
and social control or government. Detailed discus- 
sion of these wants and of their satisfaction and 
regulation includes an account of such matters as 
land ownership, wealth production, capital and 
labor, labor conditions, wages, factories, corpora- 
tions, transportation, means of communication, so- 
cial institutions, taxes, and governmental activities. 
In picturing life at any given epoch, all these factors 
should, according to Dr. Leavitt, receive considera- 
tion. The idea, though somewhat heavy and ana- 
lytical for direct use with grade school students, 
still holds much that is suggestive to the teacher ^ 

^ This plan was designed for use with prevocational pupils in the upper 
grammar grades. 

2 Much of this material can be developed in historical class games. 
The continued-in-our-next epical story, so popular in the marionette 



110 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

as to the selection of historical material which will 
help the student to understand by contrast with 
the past the world in which he lives and the economic 
institutions (like the factory system, the corpora- 
tion, or the labor organization) upon which his life 
depends but which grade school histories and grade 
school teachers have done little so far to explain. 

We have yet to discover the inspired historian who 
can paint this picture of world history with the 
bright color and simple composition necessary for 
childish interest and yet with the critical selective 
judgment to discern what are the significant facts 
that will help the child to subsequent intelligence. 
But much progressive work is being done by individ- 
ual teachers and the time is not far distant when no 
grade school will graduate its students without some 
general knowledge of world history : of the share of 
each foreign nation in this story; of its relation, 
racially, culturally, politically, and commercially, to 
our own; and of the aims, aspirations, struggles, 
and triumphs of American social, industrial, and 
political democracy. 

The mixed character of our immigrant population 
is indeed a challenge to such teaching, a challenge 
which, under existing conditions, cannot long be 

theaters of Latin peoples, is a delightful method of drawing the whole 
class sooner or later into a story game and of ultimately reproducing 
the whole fabric of domestic, social, political, economic, and military life 
of a by-gone era. Such tales as those of Beowulf, Roland, and Charle- 
magne, Ulysses, and Hiawatha lend themselves to this treatment. Read 
Browning's autobiographical poem. Development. See also Guerber's 
Story of the Epic. 



HISTORY 111 

disregarded. The War has shown us how harapering 
and dangerous to national strength is the unassim- 
ilated foreign element which as yet we have done 
little systematically to Americanize; and whose 
children, when enrolled in our public schools, find 
nothing on to which they can piece their early train- 
ing and experience, but, on the contrary, must begin 
all over again to learn the ways and the history of 
a country apparently quite disconnected from and 
often contemptuous of or hostile to their native 
land. How different would be their feeling, how 
much more rapid and easy their Americanization if 
they found world history being taught in the public 
schools, a world history in which their native country 
had a place and which showed how American his- 
tory, American institutions, and American ideals 
are only a part of the great struggle for democracy 
throughout the world; how we are ahead in this 
struggle as compared with the lands from which 
they come ; and how loyalty to America, their new 
fatherland, means that all the world will profit by 
its progress and be lifted nearer and nearer to our 
common human goal! 

Germany has been able by a rigid educational 
program centered about German history to swing 
her people almost as a unit in the wake of a world 
aim narrowly Teutonic in its character. Cannot 
America through a more enlightened policy imbue 
her people with a world idea of mutual trust, honor, 
and cooperation, for which our foreign population 
would be the most active missionaries? The story 



112 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

of the early European migrations is a romantic 
one which any child can comprehend. The story of 
America is but another phase of these migrations. 
Europe is a family cut by artificial national frontiers, 
and America the melting pot which proves after all 
is said and done, its racial homogeneity. Let us 
then teach our children not only the American 
chapter of the story but the context that gives 
American history its world meaning. For only 
thus can we make of American history an inspira- 
tional source of national unity for that three-fourths 
of our population to whom the Pilgrim Fathers count 
for nothing by blood and heritage, but to whom 
America as the triumphant western wing in the 
great world battle for democracy is a thrilling ideal 
to which they yield willing allegiance and support. 
American history thus widens to the cosmopolitan. 
To be an American is to be a brother of Leonidas, 
Brutus, Joan of Arc, Winkelried, Cromwell, Kos- 
ciusko, Washington, Garibaldi, Lincoln, Kitchener, 
and Papa Joffre — all heroes who have fought for 
freedom deck the pages of our story. And our 
own gallant colonial struggle and Revolution; our 
costly civil war; our development of free institu- 
tions ; our Cuban intervention ; and our participa- 
tion in the present world conflict rise to ah even 
higher and nobler plane when viewed as links in 
the chain of a great world effort and idea. Our 
history peculiarly fits us for a nationalism which is 
only a step toward international brotherhood. A 
continent settled in the cause of freedom; a nation 



HISTORY 113 

born of a war for representative government; a 
government formed of the union of many sovereign 
states cooperating for the common weal; a mixed 
but harmonious population which for centuries has 
sought these shores in quest of liberty — here is a 
story whose teaching will result not in a narrow and 
provincial nationalism dangerous to world safety, 
but in the generous extension to international pol- 
itics of the American federal idea. 



VI 

ART FOR LITTLE FOLKS 

From time immemorial, we have recognized that 
the love of beauty is the basis of all dependable, 
spontaneous morality. Men will be habitually good 
rather than bad and do habitually right rather than 
wrong, not because they fear punishment, not even 
because their intellect instructs them that this or 
that is the good, the right, the social act to perform, 
but because the good, the right, the social act seems 
beautiful, pleasing, and attractive ; and the wrong, 
the bad, and the unsocial act ugly, unpleasing, and 
repulsive. Refined tastes, instinctive preference 
for beauty and for harmony, these are the sure and 
steady sources of all wholesome living, the sources 
which operate automatically, instantly, unreflec- 
tively, from within, and in the absence of external 
compulsions. To love beauty in this sense, to carry 
the kingdom of heaven within one's soul, involves 
more than a mere love of beauty in its visible, sensu- 
ous forms, more than a liking for pretty colors, 
pretty pictures, pretty music, or artistic furniture. 
But in the training of the very young, it is necessary 
to begin with what is sensuous and objective as a 
foundation for and introduction to the higher spir- 

114 



ART FOR LITTLE FOLKS 115 

itual values. Thus in our lower schools, art work of 
various sorts has rightly become an important part 
of the curriculum, since through it the child most 
easily learns the principles of beauty and harmony, 
balance, and proportion that form the necessary 
framework of an ordered life. 

Such art instruction has up to the present in the 
grammar grades consisted principally of drawing, 
painting, modeling, and various craft work in wood, 
leather, and textile materials. This training, once 
so formal and abstract, is being gradually adapted 
to the pupil's daily life and interests. He draws 
objects and scenes from his own vital experience, 
not the old prescribed geometrical arrangements of 
the teacher's childhood days. He makes in the 
manual training lesson, not formal exercises, but 
things for personal and family use. This is all good 
and as it should be. But little has been done as 
yet in a systematic way to form childish tastes or 
to familiarize young children understandingly with 
the work of great masters in the field of decoration, 
illustration, painting, sculpture, architecture, or in- 
dustrial art. And almost nothing has been done to 
tap the vast reservoir of social history which these 
subjects represent. 

Yet much of this material is eminently suitable 
for presentation even in the primer grades, the 
decorative and industrial arts (particularly of more 
primitive peoples) being especially well adapted for 
the play and study of the youngest children, because 
they are the outgrowths of basic human activities 



116 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

which all children can understand and which they 
love to imitate. 

Suppose for instance that in the telling of Indian 
legends, the subject of basketry is touched upon. 
What a wealth of artistic and social material lies 
ready to our hands ! There is a work the child can 
do himself! Here are objects with which he can 
play, whose relation to daily life can be easily made 
clear ; here are principles of construction and deco- 
ration which can be traced simply and directly to the 
life and habits and surroundings of the people which 
gave them birth, a life full of romance and interest 
for the imaginative child; here is a treatise worth 
many didactic volumes on conventional design and 
appropriate decoration ; here is the whole philosophy 
of industrial art suddenly taking on the form of a 
thrilling story, replete with human interest, of ines- 
timable value as a social history, a picture of life 
under other conditions than our own, working out 
its own art in answer to its own needs. 

But how, you ask, are we to draw from the sub- 
ject of Indian baskets this complex informatory 
matter? At this point in our discussion, it may 
perhaps be helpful to suggest by a sample lesson 
the treatment which can be accorded any such prob- 
lem in decorative and industrial art. 

A Study of Indian Basketry for Third Grade 

Children 

A long time ago before Columbus discovered 
America and before the white people came across 



ART FOR LITTLE FOLKS 117 

the ocean to settle in what is now the United States, 
great tribes of Indians wandered here and there over 
the hills and plains of North America. If you have 
read the story of Hiawatha, you know how these 
Indians lived by hunting and fishing, moving in 
tribes from place to place as the wild animals were 
all killed off by the hunters. Instead of houses, 
the Indians lived in a sort of tent, or wigwam, made 
sometimes of skins and sometimes of twigs and 
leaves. These wigwams could be put up and taken 
down more quickly than our heavy stone and brick 
and frame houses and this made it easy for an Indian 
village to move when the food supply was exhausted 
or a dangerous enemy came into the neighborhood. 
The Indians did not have much furniture in their 
houses. In fact, they did not know how to make a 
great many things which we use every day. They 
had not learned how to dig metal out of the earth and 
melt and refine it so as to make iron and steel and 
tin and copper and aluminum. They had no steel 
knives and weapons ; no tin pans ; no iron kettles. 
Their knives and arrow heads and hatchets were 
made out of stone. Do you think you could make a 
stone sharp enough to cut meat or chop down a 
tree ? The Indians could ! Instead of pots and pans 
and dishes, what do you suppose they sometimes 
used to do their cooking in.'' And what do you 
suppose they used to carry their food and their 
other household possessions when they traveled 
from one place to another ? You never could guess. 
Baskets! They cooked in baskets. They ate out 



118 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

of baskets. They used baskets instead of a pantry 
and an icebox. They carried everything in baskets. 

I suppose you do not see how the Indians could 
cook in baskets. Indian baskets were usually 
made out of grass woven together very, very skill- 
fully. Sometimes the grass was woven together so 
closely that the baskets would actually hold water. 
They were shaped like bowls and jars and pans and 
were big and little and thick and thin. Now imag- 
ine that you had a basket shaped like a great bowl, 
and that you wanted to cook corn-meal mush (you 
know we still call yellow corn meal Indian meal 
because it was the Indians who first taught us to eat 
the corn we all like so well) or succotash (that is 
also something good which the Indians taught us 
to eat). Well then, what would you do? You 
would mix up the corn meal and water in the water- 
tight basket. You couldn't put the basket on the 
fire, you know, because it would burn. But you 
would heat some clean, smooth, round stones in the 
fire, and when they were hot, you would drop the 
stones right into the basket with the corn meal 
and water and pretty soon the mush would begin 
to cook. Try it the next time you go to a picnic 
and have a camp fire. You can use a kettle instead 
of a basket, because very few of us now have baskets 
fine enough to keep the mush from leaking out. 

You can't imagine how fine and beautiful some 
of the Indian baskets were. You see, the Indians 
really made very few things and all their effort and 
love of beauty went into their weapons, their canoes, 



ART FOR LITTLE FOLKS 119 

their dress, their pottery, and their baskets. After 
a while, I shall tell you about the beautiful blankets 
they made to wear, but just now we want to know 
how they wove these baskets, what they wove them 
of, and how they shaped and decorated them. 

Would you like to hear a story about an Indian 
girl and her mother who were famous for making 
the most beautiful baskets of any women in their 
whole tribe .f^ You know in those days there were 
many tribes of Indians scattered all over America 
from the Atlantic on the east to the great rolling 
Pacific Ocean on the west. This basket weaver 
and her daughter lived in the far, far West at the 
foot of the Cascade Mountains. One evening they 
sat in their wigwam sorting out the roots and grasses 
they had gathered that day in the mountains. A 
veil of purple mist had settled over the valley and 
there was a chill in the air, but they kept the fire 
burning brightly and they were warm and cozy. 
All summer long they had gathered grasses and 
roots and twigs for their baskets. Sometimes they 
climbed to the snow line of a high mountain ; some- 
times they worked for hours digging in the sand so 
as not to injure the delicate roots they needed for 
the design on some particular basket. And now they 
were sorting out the glossy mountain grass of which 
the baskets were woven, from the maidenhair fern 
with its black stem out of which they made the 
lovely dark borders and patterns. They were split- 
ting the willow and red bud twigs into fine strands 
to make the baskets strong. And they were putting 



120 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

the tough grasses and twigs to soak to make them 
clean and pliable. Some they were even dyeing red 
and brown with berry juices. And they had feathers, 
also, which they had picked up and which the young 
chiefs had brought them — dozens and dozens of 
black quail feathers, and yellow hammer feathers, 
too, bright as the gold of the sunlight in the morning 
when it first falls on the leaves and makes them look 
as though King Midas had touched them with his 
magic fingers. 

All around the wigwam where they were working, 
were the most beautiful baskets in the world, much 
prettier than any we can buy to-day at the stores. 
Because this was a long, long time ago, and the 
Indians to-day have almost forgotten how to make 
these lovely things. There were the big basket 
bowls and little basket bowls and baskets like jars 
and great baskets shaped like a cone which they used 
for carrying things in and which were so light that 
you could scarcely feel them if they were hung from 
your shoulders against your back, the way the 
Indians carried them. The baskets were almost 
all creamy white, but oh, such wonderful patterns 
as they had woven on them in black and brown and 
orange and red! 

If you were making something very pretty like a 
white grass basket and wanted to decorate it, what 
would you do? I suppose you would draw a pic- 
ture of the prettiest thing you could think of and 
then try to copy it on the basket with colored 
grasses. Only sometimes the copy you wove out 



ART FOR LITTLE FOLKS 121 

of the grasses would look a little queer and 
square because you just can't make a curved pat- 
tern by weaving. Try it to see if you can make a 
real, round circle the next time you weave a mat out 
of paper or make a rag rug. Now you remember we 
said that the Indians lived out of doors by hunting 
and fishing in the mountains. What do you suppose 
they would want to make pictures of on their bas- 
kets ? The birds and the animals and the fishes ; 
the arrows they shot with ; the mountains and trees .; 
the flowing streams of water in which they caught 
the fish ; and sometimes even the lightning of which 
they were so afraid when it came flashing down from 
the mountains and striking the tall pine trees in the 
valleys. Only the basket weavers wouldn't draw 
pictures. They would just think them in their 
heads and then try to weave them in the baskets. 
And the pictures would look sometimes a little 
queer and square and stiff when they were done 
because that's the way you have to make patterns 
when you weave with grass. You try to make a 
raffia basket and see. 

Here are some pictures of baskets like those the 
Indian basket maker and her daughter had in their 
wigwam. Do you see the wavy streams of water 
all flowing down to the lake in the middle of the 
first ? Here is one with a beautiful border just like 
the black and brown diamond pattern on the back 
of a rattlesnake. Here is another dotted all over 
with arrow heads. And here is one I like almost 
the best of all with a border of mountains reflected 



122 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

in the water of a lake around the top. Some of 
the patterns tell whole stories too — 

But here I have got so interested talking about 
baskets that I have forgotten about what the Indian 
mother and her little girl are doing. ... At this 
point should follow a lively Indian legend, a real 
story, which will account in some incidental way 
for the making of a sun basket as a peace offering 
to the gods and show how baskets were used in 
religious worship. 

Persian rugs, Japanese and Chinese screens, 
Greek pottery, medieval tapestry, stained glass win- 
dows, a dozen other similar subjects readily suggest 
themselves as points of entry into social history and 
the problems of industrial design, problems which 
will be fascinating to the children because they can 
be made to appeal to the play instinct, and which 
will arise quite naturally in the course of history, 
reading, and story-telling. 

But industrial and decorative design are not the 
only social resources of the art instructor. Portrait 
painting and sculpture, the genre pictures of the 
Dutch, French, and English artists, the work of the 
great landscape artists, and last but almost most 
important, the great architectural movements of 
the ages — here is material which will at once foster 
a taste for beauty ; give an understanding of artistic 
development and the relation of art to life ; and pic- 
ture for the growing child the social customs and 
the architectural and natural background of life in 
its progressive stages. 



VII 
GENERAL SCIENCE 

In the old days a gentleman's education was 
encyclopedic. He studied not physics but science; 
not arithmetic but mathematics; not English but 
literature. Of course he did not cover thoroughly 
this wider range; his knowledge was amateurish 
and smattering. But he had a contact with many 
fields of human activity, and information varied 
though not profound about many things of perennial 
human interest. Now general courses have gone 
out of date. Our high school student looks in vain 
through the schedule for the old half year of science 
in which everything was touched upon from moons to 
microbes. He finds that he must choose : physiol- 
ogy, psychology, geology, physiography, biology, 
botany, physics, chemistry, or astronomy — any one 
will absorb a year of his precious time, and if he 
wishes to know about electricity, he must resign, 
however reluctantly, his chance at Mars. This 
is proper and no cause for complaint from critics 
of curricula. But is there no place in education for 
the old encyclopedic, fascinating, tinkering general 
science? No place to satisfy without specialization 
the darting, miscellaneous, eager curiosity of the 

123 



124 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

growing youngster about the world? No place to 
awaken scientific interest and point out the radiating 
avenues of special study ? What of the grade school 
curriculum ? What science work do we offer to the 
student in our common schools ? 

The alert elementary school teacher conducts an 
all-year-round laboratory and lecture course in gen- 
eral science. Her pupils are continually bringing 
her a flower, a beetle, an old bird's nest, a leaf, 
or an acorn for identification. They are forever 
asking "why.^^" about this or that common natural 
phenomenon. But apart from the hygiene and 
nature study which now form a part of many state 
courses of instruction, this general science work is 
carried on quite hit or miss, without definite plan- 
ning, without apparatus, and without specific train- 
ing on the part of the teacher. Can nothing be 
done to systematize science in the grades, to widen 
its scope, and to assist the teacher in its presenta- 
tion, while preserving at the same time the spon- 
taneity which its present impromptu character in- 
sures ? 

So many necessary social habits, such as sanitation 
and conservation, imply as their basis the scientific 
attitude, and so many industrial tasks are scientific 
in their character that to impart to the multitude 
of persons who never pass beyond the grammar 
school some inklings as to physical, chemical, and 
biologic processes would be a long step toward 
community efficiency. And there is no time at 
which the child is more curious to understand how 



GENERAL SCIENCE 125 

things are made and how they "go" than the gram- 
mar school age ; no time when he is more eager to 
do things himself for the mere joy of trying them 
out. In a rough and fumbling way, the grade 
school child is an ideal laboratory worker. It re- 
mains for the liberal board of education and the 
progressive teacher to provide equipment and plan 
a course of study. 

As little folks tire quickly at prolonged and con- 
centrated effort, care must be taken in selecting the 
material for such a course. Sustained microscopic 
work is impossible (though the microscope is an 
invaluable grade school resource) and hence the 
finer detailed sorts of botany are quite impossible. 
But a descriptive field study of trees and plants and 
flowers with their life history and uses has been 
proved entirely feasible, and the elements of biology 
invite similar exploration. Bird lore and the habits 
of domestic animals have already received consid- 
erable attention, but much more can be done along 
the lines of their uses and services, their proper 
care, and what the small hero of a new Wells novel 
calls "the insides of animals." For I know nothing 
which so impresses one with the mystery and value 
of life as the intricate beautiful physical organism of 
the lowest of created things. 

Nor need we stop with so-called nature studies, 
for are physics and chemistry entirely beyond the 
upper grade school child .^ The public grammar 
schools of France employ a science text in which 
such matters of common intelligence as the composi- 



126 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

tion of air and water and the fundamental facts of 
mechanics, heat, light, electricity, and sound are all 
set forth in simple terms and illustrated by simple 
experiments the children can quite well perform. 
While this matter is presented not as illustrative of 
scientific principles but merely as interesting facts, 
still it gives the pupil an idea of the wonder of 
common things and their control by ascertainable 
laws. It explains the ordinary phenomena of life, 
prepares the mind for an intelligent observance of 
social and sanitary codes, and often stimulates to 
later independent study. In our own rural schools, 
the new teaching of agriculture is a long stride in 
the same direction, for although the work is neces- 
sarily limited and specialized, it proves the feasibility 
of a kind of scientific study which we had not deemed 
possible in grade school classes. Astronomy, too, 
holds wonderful material for the elementary teacher 
and the time will come when no common school will 
be without its telescope and no instructor will be 
ignorant of its use or of the interesting facts which 
her children can, through it, discover. 

In all this work, the great contribution of the 
elementary school teacher to science will be to train 
her pupils always to ask " why ?" She has not done 
so heretofore because too often she herself did not 
know enough about science to answer questions, 
because there was no time in the curriculum for 
miscellaneous scientific study, and because neither 
texts nor apparatus were provided in the grades 
to satisfy such curiosity when once aroused. But 



GENERAL SCIENCE 127 

elementary teachers will henceforth be better trained 
in general science, textbooks will be written, simple 
laboratory apparatus will be provided by up-to-date 
boards of education, and grade school pupils, too, will 
at length hear at least the opening chapters of those 
"fairytales of science" which make secondary edu- 
cation to-day so much more vital to our red-blooded 
boys and girls. 



I 



vin 

MANUAL TRAINING 

At the close of the War, we shall be confronted 
by the question of the future military training of 
American youth. Agitation for making the present 
war training permanent is already under way, and 
the practical American mind is likely to find in the 
already erected and costly cantonments the most 
conclusive argument for its perpetuation. Univer- 
sal training of both sexes for national service, for 
subordination of self to the common cause, is indeed 
a prime requisite for American national strength. 
But thinking Americans will not wish this training 
to be merely military, necessary as defensive prepar- 
ation now seems to be. We shall not wish our youth, 
caught at the imaginative, formative period, to be 
run through a mere army mill; governed, as all ef- 
fective armies must be, autocratically from above; 
and producing martial technique and the habit of 
obedience as its highest fruits. The blind allegiance 
of the German people to their leaders in an undem- 
ocratic war has given us a conclusive demonstration 
of the evil results of such a national discipline. 
We in America shall be careful to select a type of 
training which will not contradict by its very nature 

128 



MANUAL TRAINING 129 

the American principles which it is destined to 
protect. We shall wish it to reflect and prepare for 
the realization of American ideals ; we shall wish it 
to be democratic, self-disciplinary, and cooperative 
rather than rigidly officered ; and we shall wish to 
see it creative as well as defensive, directed toward 
peace time service in perfecting our democracy as 
well as war time sacrifice for its protection. The 
thrilling idealism and spirit of self -consecration which 
stirs America to-day must not be left to evaporate 
at the close of the War, but must be crystallized into 
some institution for universal training in national 
service which will perpetuate this war-inspired fervor 
and direct it into constructive social channels. 

It has been said that the engineering branch of the 
old army points the way to the new universal train- 
ing of the future — the construction division which 
drained the district of Panama; stamped out the 
plague in Cuba and the Philippines ; laid the roads 
and built the bridges which have opened up those 
islands to the contact of civilization ; and constructed 
vast irrigation and engineering enterprises in our 
own Southwest. Think of American youths of 
both sexes mobilized for a year or more during that 
impressionable period when academic education is 
completed, and the problems of adult life have not 
yet begun ; subjected to wholesome and orderly camp 
discipline; strengthened by physical training and 
life in the open ; and turning their energies into 
constructive enterprises cooperatively performed 
for the national good! Reclamation of uncultivat- 



ISO SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

able land, forest patrol, reforestation, game and fish 
protection, road building; task after task suggests 
itself as the core about which such vital training 
could be built, training which would harden the 
physique, stamp the young mind with a sense of 
national and social responsibility, and train it to 
group action, obedience, and cooperation. Nor 
would definite military training be neglected, but 
in such a scheme of national education, this military 
instruction would be a means and not an end, a 
vital though subordinate part of a larger plan for 
national well-being. 

It is idle at this point to prophesy just what form 
such training will assume, but whatever the final 
program, it is certain that no subject in the secondary 
and elementary schools can so surely lead up to it 
in method and ideals as properly directed manual 
training. No subject so easily lends itself to social 
manipulation as the ordinary handwork for boys and 
girls in our lower schools. No subject can be so 
naturally and properly used to develop a whole- 
some sense of social responsibility and a love of 
social service ; yet no subject has been on the whole 
so individualistic in its methods and results. Even 
the recitation, which, under the worst circumstances, 
still in other courses remains a group effort, is in 
the manual training class broken up into individual 
work at an individual desk with individual tools on 
objects usually designed for individual use. Indeed 
the incentive of making things for one's self, one's 
family, or one's friends has been largely responsible 



MANUAL TRAINING 131 

for the superior liveliness of interest in manual 
training subjects. Yet manual training offers to 
the inspired school director the most natural means 
of getting children to think and work for others. It 
is a kindergarten maxim that no most trifling object 
the children make shall be retained for their own 
use, but that each thing shall be constructed as a 
gift. In starting each piece of handiwork, the 
kindergarten teacher asks, *' Should you not like to 
make a pretty basket like this for Mother ? " Slowly, 
surely, the motive of service is thus awakened. 
But in the upper grades and the high school, little 
is done to carry on this social training. This seems 
an unnecessary pedagogic waste. Children are so 
absorbed in the mere constructive activity involved 
in manual work (especially when it is imitative of 
that of adults and forms a sort of life play) that the 
added incentive of personal ownership is rarely 
needed to hold their interest. Here is the teacher's 
chance to attach to their delight in doing, the added 
delight of doing for a practical end and the social 
discipline of doing for others. 

Some teachers and some whole school systems have 
already based their manual training on these prin- 
ciples, and the Junior Red Cross movement with 
its turning over of handwork periods to the making 
of hospital and army supplies and relief garments, 
blazes the trail for a permanent reorganization of 
our handwork to embrace this valuable opportunity. 
There are several ways in which manual training 
has been given a social direction in our American 



132 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

public schools. First there is the teacher who en- 
courages his pupils to construct things for his family. 
This is good as far as it goes, though family loyalty 
is likely to be only a larger egoism, and something 
more than this is needed to awaken a sense of civic 
responsibility in our coming citizens. Other schools 
utilize the products of the manual training classes 
in equipping their own buildings. Students of car- 
pentry construct tables, desks, and chairs for library, 
laboratory and classroom, or even build additions 
to the school plant. The pupils in iron work and 
engineering courses construct tools and machinery 
for the school shops and laboratories. Cooking 
classes operate the school lunch room, and sewing 
classes make gymnasium suits, graduation dresses, 
and costumes for the plays and pageants in which 
the school takes part. Printing classes issue the 
school paper and print programs and study outlines. 
In one western city^ the process is carried even 
further and students in practical branches of the 
summer school work for the whole school system; 
they put up, glaze, wire, instal plumbing in, and 
paint new school buildings and construct the fix- 
tures and movable furniture therein required, thus 
widening the area of their activities from what will 
be of immediate practical service to their own group 
to those things which serve other sections of the 
community as well. All these methods of leading 
the student out of himself and introducing him to 

^ Kansas City, Missouri. See Bulletin of Federal Board for Voca- 
tional Education, No. 20. 



MANUAL TRAINING 1S3 

group problems are steps toward the realization of 
the double possibilities of manual training as an in- 
dividual and a social discipline. 

But much remains to be accomplished ; and espe- 
cially is it interesting to ask what will replace at the 
close of the War, the Red Cross work which has so 
largely occupied domestic science classes in the 
last two years. Teachers will be reluctant to lose 
the class enthusiasm and the training in service 
which this war work has brought into the school 
curriculum; can they not find in similar local needs 
the answer to their problem ? Even as the War 
progressed, the necessity for civilian relief and the 
possibility of using sewing, cooking, and carpentry 
classes for satisfying this need grew more apparent. 
And in the civic and social reconstruction which 
must inevitably follow upon the War, will there not 
be a hundred local problems to which each school 
could turn its energies, so that the practical work 
of the students will not be wasted in aimless exer- 
cises or absorbed in selfish enterprises for their own 
enjoyment, but will be directed instead into channels 
that develop that group spirit, that disciplined co- 
operation, and that sense of civic social responsi- 
bilities which underlie all self-sacrificing patriotism, 
all sure and democratic national progress? 



IX 

SOCIAL PLAY 

Study and work are a preparation for living; 
play is life itself. As a type, then, of that for which 
we are preparing the pupils in our schools, their 
play needs most of all to be socialized. The play 
habits which we give them in their growing years 
will stamp and character forever that part of their 
later life which is wholly self-directed, that part for 
which, humanly and individually, the rest exists, 
that part in which they are truly themselves. Liter- 
ature, art, song, — these finest manifestations, these 
ripe fruits of civilization, in which we taste its real 
significance, are but play, glorified, spiritualized, and 
crystallized. At the bottom of a nation's art lies 
the nation's play. Only nations that can play 
create great art ; art in which a people 

" Pausing a moment from the strife 
And whirling business of daily life. 
For but a moment are what they would be ; " 

art which lifts us with them nearer the divine. 

And how well have we Americans learned to play ? 
How well have we learned to play together — as 
people must do the things that count in this social 
world ? We have indeed our national sports : we 

134 



SOCIAL PLAY 1S5 

have our school and college athletics with their 
training in the honesty and team work which is so 
necessary for individual, political, and social success 
in a democracy ; we have our big baseball games with 
their cheering thousands in the bleachers catching 
the infectious spirit of group sympathy; we have 
our public parks and tennis courts and golf links and 
swimming pools ; we have our commercial recreations 
— our big amusement parks where hundreds jostle 
each other sociably in holiday mood, our theaters and 
movies, our dance halls and skating rinks, our con- 
certs and lectures. Our fun is good and wholesome 
and energetic. 

But as a people, have we learned to play? Has 
every American had the democratic stimulus of 
team work in school or community games ? Do we 
all play daily, freely, spontaneously, and creatively ; 
or does our so-called play take the form of mere 
exercise to keep us fit, and mere watching other 
people work for a living in theaters and concert 
halls? And does our play when we do ourselves 
creatively engage in it, express physically and spir- 
itually, our unattained ideals, the fine, free, joyous 
impulses that flower in those free moments when we 
are most ourselves — or is it a sort of spiritual and 
physical sprawl, a sag below instead of a leap above 
the level of our working life? 

However these questions may be answered, it is 
the great opportunity of the school teacher, especially 
of the school teacher in the grammar grades, to de- 
velop the play spirit among his pupils and to direct 



1S6 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

it into socializing channels. It used to be thought 
that any one could play ; now we know that we must 
be taught to play just as we are taught to eat or 
read or calculate; that is, if we are to play whole- 
somely and well. And this is why the big public 
schools in our larger cities have a playground teacher 
as well as an arithmetic teacher; and this is why 
the regular instructors in smaller towns themselves 
supervise the play in the school yard at recess, organ- 
ize games, teams, and contests, and see that every 
child, and not only those who are particularly adept, 
has a chance to participate therein.^ Gone are the 
days when teacher grumblingly turned out her 
wriggling roomful at recess and then remained 
"sulking in her tent" till time to ring the bell and 
drag the stragglers in. Teacher now follows the 
class to the playground, romps with them herself 
(getting thus deeper under their skins than birch 
switch ever penetrated) , and organizes new and more 
fascinating sports when blind man's buff and tag 
begin to pall. 

But it is not only in playground games, athletics, 
cave digging, bird study, gardening, constructing 
school improvements, and the like that the skillful 
teacher organizes and directs play life. There are 
indoor outlets for the play impulse, for nonutili- 
tarian self-expression, which are equally valuable. 

^ Increasingly urgent criticism comes from parents that emphasis 
on interscholastic athletics is resulting in overattention to pupils who 
promise to represent the school well in such contests at the expense of 
the less adept who need athletic training more. 



SOCIAL PLAY 137 

Music, for instance. There is nothing so certain to 
weld a jarring roomful into unity as group singing. 
The whole crowd shares at once the cooperative 
effort, the cooperative product, and the cooperative 
pleasure. We have music in our schools and music 
in our lives to be sure ; but Americans on the whole 
are not a singing people. And it is largely because 
they have never been taught to sing. In our new 
army cantonments where directed singing has been 
established as a part of the regular routine, music 
has become at once an emotional outlet for our 
soldiers and sailors, and a great patriotic inspiration 
and unifying force. So should it be in every social 
and community group. But we are tongue-tied for 
lack of elementary instruction in the mechanics of 
breathing and tone placing ; and for lack of knowl- 
edge of what to sing. In the old times, everyone 
had at least a stock of hymns in his head, the solid 
bread of song by which long generations had been 
fed. But now the hymns have lapsed with the 
church-going habit; nothing has come to take their 
place ; and if we are not as a nation to lose the emo- 
tional safety-valve of music and the fine cooperative 
discipline of social singing, we must restock our 
generations with music in the public school. 

But what shall we sing and how ? How teach the 
simple mechanics of vocal expression, familiarize 
the children with the best music suited to their age 
and apprehension, and keep the play spirit which 
makes singing a delightful recreation.? What to 
sing presents the first and most difficult problem. 



138 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

Unfortunately hymns are taboo in the public school ; 
popular ragtime melodies meet with little pedagogic 
support — forgetful as we often are that their in- 
sistent, obvious rhythms are often precisely suited 
to the childish appetite ; our patriotic and war songs 
are as a rule good, simple, and easy for children's 
voices and at the moment of this writing are one of 
the strongest forces of patriotic education in American 
life; but among classical selections, what shall we 
choose for our little folks to sing ? Tuneful things, 
the things they like to sing and will keep on liking 
to sing, not things designed as musical gymnastics. 
The operatic fever has run its course in music texts, 
and left school singing all too often dead along its 
path. But the flood is receding, and the simple, 
substantial, average-ranged pieces have come into 
their own again; the intimate songs which voice 
each poignant human mood, purify it, and by its 
expression, free us from its tyranny. Abide With 
Me, Annie Laurie, Flow Gently Sweet Afton, Loch 
Lomond, Mighty LaF a Rose, My Old Kentucky 
Home, Way Down Upon the Swanee River, Massa's 
in the Cold, Cold Groun ', The Campbells Are Coming, 
MandeVs Largo, Du Bist Wie Fine Blume, Malbrook 
S'en Va-t~en Guerre, Mandalay, Juanita, Sweet and 
Low, Hush-a-Bye Baby, Good Night Ladies, Drink to 
Me Only With Thine Fyes, Old Heidelberg, The Stein 
Song, The Midshipmite, Stille Nacht, Paloma, The 
Requiem, and a host of other unambitious melodies 
within the compass of school voices and ability 
suggest themselves, songs which, stored in the mind 



SOCIAL PLAY 139 

of the youthful singer, will return to him again and 
yet again and bear interest a hundredfold both in 
social gatherings and as an outlet for the troubled 
heart in solitude. Many teachers now advocate 
not only the singing hour but the Victrola hour; 
this too has its distinct advantages, but after all, it 
is a passive affair, not to be compared with the sim- 
plest singing in development value. For a roomful 
of youngsters brimming with life and energy to 
join, without a supporting accompaniment/ in the 
singing of some fine old part song, is the most perfect 
representation possible in school activity of self- 
controlled, self-directed, cooperative play which lifts 
man above the limits of time and place into the clear 
unclouded region of his dreams. 

Nor is music valuable merely as the most refining 
of all disciplines, the most cogent of all social solvents, 
the most perfect emancipator of the human soul. 
Through music as through literature, we widen our 
knowledge and understanding of the great peoples 
beyond our borders with whom we are so soon to 
embark upon the great adventure of a federated, 
international life. The pellucid cadence of an old 
French ballad, beautiful, clear, and unillusioned ; 
the sweet, heart -piercing melodies of Scotland; 
the mystic sadness of Scandinavian folk song; the 
flashing sword and sunshine of Italian airs ; the 
tragic sentimentalism of German music; and the 

1 The test of good group singing is without the piano. This trains 
the ear and disciphnes attention. The group which sings without an 
accompaniment does not follow the piano ; it keeps together. 



140 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

strange, uneasy, fateful, somber power of Russian 
harmonies — what are these but the great emotional 
highway into national character? The child who 
has sung the world's music is already in his heart the 
brother of all peoples. 

Dramatics is the second indoor type of play which 
brims with social possibilities. All children's play 
is instinctively dramatic, but in composing from life 
a dramatic episode for school presentation, in the 
dramatization of some incident in history or fiction, 
or in the mere presentation of an already existing 
drama, this basic instinct is elevated above the 
merely accidental and becomes conscious and self- 
controlled.^ The value for self-discipline of taking 
part in a dramatic entertainment needs no explana- 
tion ; but the value of dramatics as a training for 
community play is just beginning to be recognized. 
Charity dramatics and local pageants — historical, 
patriotic, or social — are paving the way to the 
community theater, or at any rate to an era of 
civic recreation heretofore undreamed of, which will 
express in living forms our national purposes and 
weld together as never before our national life. We 
have neglected the element of symbol and ritual in 
our public life ; but the history of civilization teaches 
us that it is through ritual and dramatic represen- 
tation that ideas become warm and vital to the 

^ The puppet show, with its added problems of constructing the stage, 
the puppets, and their costumes, is also invaluable both as a dramatic 
exercise and a motivation for manual training. See Gesell, The Normal 
Child and Primary Education, Chapter X. 



SOCIAL PLAY 141 

popular mind. Through community drama and 
pageantry more surely than in any other way can 
these moral and ethical ideals of public and private 
conduct for which America must stand be blended 
inseparably with our national consciousness, and 
the word American become synonymous with all the 
splendid qualities toward which we strive ; while 
to be unjust, unchaste, intemperate, unforgiving, 
cruel, and undemocratic comes to be covered in the 
instinctive speech of every loyal citizen by the one 
term of un-American.^ From intelligently con- 
ducted school dramatics, it is but a step for the 
child into the wider field of dramatizing public life 
and national ideals; and the grade school teacher 
who has given her pupils dramatic experience and 
interest in dramatizing and poetizing the vital issues 
of the passing hour, has not only trained them in 
group activity and awakened in them a taste for 
the higher, more educative forms of recreation, but 
has prepared them for sharing in the cooperative 
moral and artistic life of the future American com- 
munity. 

The alert instructor, however, will utilize not 
merely those interests closely bound up with the 
school program ; she will initiate and promote extra- 
academic activities, like the Boy Scout, Girl Scout, 
and Camp Fire work, which not only embody group 
action, discipline, service, and fun ; bring teacher 

^ A naive and delightful example of qualitative patriotism is to be 
found in Planehet, the lackey, in The Three Musketeers. "Be satisfied, 
sir ; I am brave when I set about it ; besides, I am a Picard," 



142 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

and pupil together on a purely human basis; and 
increase our familiarity with the natural world; 
but which stimulate rugged physical development. 
That the American nation has abused its splendid 
pioneer heritage of health and grown flabby and 
soft from indoor, sedentary life, is proved by the 
rejection of so large a proportion of our drafted men 
as unfit for military service, and by the grueling 
drill which was necessary to harden even those recruits 
who were free from serious physical defects. We 
have taught physiology and hygiene in every Ameri- 
can school district. But too often we have neglected 
to follow these rules into the pupil's action and give 
him the emotional incentive necessary for their 
observation, the actual liking for a vigorous, health- 
ful way of life. Real toughening, hardening, and 
physical ruggedness come not from school calisthen- 
ics and gymnasium drill (necessary as these are for 
corrective, symmetrical development) , but from days 
and nights in the open, full of purposeful, strenuous 
activity. Athletics, valuable as they are, have 
this inevitable limitation : they are specialized types 
of training and not a comprehensive mode of life. 
But Boy Scout, Girl Scout, and Camp Fire activi- 
ties furnish a foundation upon which can be built 
up the pupil's whole idea of a useful, healthful, and 
happy life. Cooperation with one's fellows, social 
service, knowledge of the natural world, sane notions 
as to food, sleep, and clothing, the joy of exercise 
taken not for itself alone but as an incidental and 
integral part of an interesting and active existence 



SOCIAL PLAY 143 

— all are woven together in Scout and Camp Fire 
ritual so as to leave an indelible mark upon the life 
tastes of the growing boy and girl, and to stamp 
forever upon their minds as living principles those 
rules of ethics and hygiene which a dozen textbook 
courses will fail to teach. The true Boy Scout does 
not open his bedroom window because he knows 
oxygen to be necessary to his physical well-being; 
he is simply stifled in an air-tight room. The Camp 
Fire girl eschews tight shoes and corsets because she 
feels caged in them, not because she knows them to 
be physically injurious. Ejiowledge is indeed the 
guide post to proper living; but it is taste or liking 
that will take us up the road. 

Nor does the vitalizing of education by such extra- 
academic activities end with this energizing of edu- 
cational ideas ; the contact of teacher and pupil 
becomes far more vital when all share together 
the routine of Scout and Camp Fire life. The rela- 
tion becomes human rather than official; the boy 
or girl, as well as the teacher, shows himself as he 
really is. The teacher watches his pupils' personal 
development and shapes instruction much more 
accurately to their needs. The pupil carries over 
into classroom work the frank give and take of camp 
relationship, with a gain in soundness of prog- 
ress which far offsets any fancied loss in formal 
classroom etiquette. No real teacher who cares 
for the vitality of his work and for reality in his 
relations with his pupils can afford to neglect the 
chance of sharing in their play which such activi- 



144 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

ties as Boy Scout, Girl Scout, and Camp Fire 
work afford.^ 

The interest of the genuine teacher in his pupils 
will not cease with the school term, but he will care 
to see that the summer months of his children are 
provided for in a way best to further their develop- 
ment. For this purpose, what is so valuable as 
the summer camp in which children are brought 
into prolonged contact with nature, and in which 
the great law that Services and Rights are equal 
can be illustrated not only for social life by cooper- 
ative camp activities, but also for our relation to 
the physical world, by scientific study of the uses and 
services of the trees, plants, animals, reptiles, and 
insects in the fields and woods about the camp ? 
Camps of varying degrees of success in imparting 
humane education are being conducted by various 
private organizations in many progressive com- 
munities ; and the alert teacher will cooperate with 
such agencies in the placement of pupils most in 
need of outings, or promote the establishment of 
such summer camps where none are already in 
operation. 2 

But the school can reach out not only into the 
life of its children and play vitally upon their leisure 

^For directions as to organization and group work in these associa- 
tions, write to Boy Scout Headquarters, 200 Fifth Ave., N. Y. C. ; Girl 
Scout Headquarters, 527 Fifth Avenue, N. Y. C; Camp Fire Head- 
quarters, 31 East 17th Street, N. Y. C. 

2 For a detailed account of the conduct of such a camp, write for the 
1919 report of the Kansas City Humane Society, City Hall, Kansas 
City, Mo. 



SOCIAL PLAY 145 

hours ; it can mold with equal educative force the 
family and civic life of its community. All this 
time, we have been speaking of the school merely as 
a place for the education of children. But it may be 
far, far more than this. What we have long needed 
in America is a democratic social rallying point. 
War work has given us for the time being a great 
bond of social union and a natural meeting place 
in surgical dressings stations and the like. But 
after the War, upon what permanent peg can we 
hang our cooperative social life.^ The school is 
the obvious meeting ground where every family can 
find a perennial common interest; it is the center 
upon which the collective life of the school district 
converges, and from which community life most 
naturally can radiate. It is axiomatic in these 
days that the school building, owned by the public 
and all too often idle and empty during the afternoon 
and evening, is the logical and economic place for 
community centers either for discussion, study, or 
recreation. But how to turn the school into a real 
community force, reaching parents as well as 
children, and directing the life currents of the 
neighborhood into wholesome civic channels, is a 
problem which puzzles the timid, and often unpre- 
pared, instructor. It is easy enough to get the 
parents to come to the school ; they all have chil- 
dren there. But what to do with them when they 
have arrived, how to transform their common in- 
terest in their own children into cooperative social 
service to the community — that is the problem. 



146 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

Perhaps the story of one rural school will prove 
an inspiration.^ 

Five years ago the Porter Schoolhouse in Adair 
County, Missouri, was as cheerless and dilapidated 
as the rural neighborhood whose children played 
truant from its classes and grew up to seek their for- 
tunes in the distant city, instead of developing the 
really rich resources of its neglected farms. To-day a 
model, furnace-heated building, simply but attrac- 
tively finished; with a well-lighted basement equipped 
with cooking apparatus, folding chairs, and tables 
for community dinners ; and furnished with study 
tables and chairs instead of fixed desks, and a tele- 
phone, typewriter, piano, magazine rack, and the 
latest periodicals and books on agriculture, has re- 
placed the old tumbledown structure. Beside it 
stands a charming cottage in which the Porter teachers 
live, and across the way is an old tenant house trans- 
formed into the Porter District Rural High School. 

How and by whom were these buildings raised 
and furnished? By the cooperative effort of the 
farmers in Porter township, stimulated by a 
woman with imagination who saw the chance 
to transform a decaying district into a progressive 
community through the medium of the school as a 
rallying point and social center. Once begun, the 
cooperative effort of the Porter people did not stop 
with the erection of a model building. Working 

^ See Rallying Round a School by Alice Mary Kimball in the Country 
Gentleman for January 19 and January 26, 1918 ; two stimulating and sug- 
gestive articles on the work of Mrs. Harvey in the Porter Rural School. 



SOCIAL PLAY 147 

together proved a profitable pleasure and now the 
neighborhood not only buys and sells cooperatively ; 
it conducts a yearly agricultural extension course 
and experiment station, which has improved agri- 
cultural methods in the district so much that land 
in Porter township has more than doubled its market 
value. A whole series of recreational and business 
enterprises have grown up around the school, infus- 
ing new joy and interest into isolated lives and 
stimulating new and undreamed-of prosperity and 
progress. The Porter Band rehearses at the school- 
house Saturday night and the neighborhood drops 
in to hear the music and see the young folks having 
a good time. The Porter Poultry Club and Cooper- 
ative Canning Club center in the school and em- 
brace grown-ups and children in their activities. 
The Porter Farm Woman's Club has pulled the lonely 
country woman out of her mental rut, and the non- 
sectarian Sunday School is reconciling religious 
differences and getting the neighborhood together 
on moral as well as business issues. And what of 
the Porter young people who in the last generation 
left Adair County for the city, and better fortune .f^ 
They are going from the Porter District High School 
to the Kirksville Normal School and the State 
University, and coming back to Porter and the land 
to make the district grow. And all this is the trans- 
forming work of one woman with social vision in 
one rural district school ! 

To make of the city school a civic center is at 
once a harder and an easier task. City life is richer 



148 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

in diversions, and more outlets for public enthusiasm 
exist in city than in rural communities. But in 
city as well as country life, the agency that keeps 
year after year, generation after generation, its 
vital point of contact with neighborhood affairs, is 
the public school. Tuberculosis will be vanquished ; 
the milk issue, the gas issue, the transportation issue 
will be solved and pass away; playground associa- 
tions will lapse with the accomplishment of their 
purpose. But as long as the sun shines and the 
spring comes round, there will be children and 
schools to train them in ; and the school will be the 
civic agency through whose patrons all things may 
be accomplished and which all things will vitally 
affect. Therefore the skillful school principal with 
the vision of real educational democracy will draw 
together the families of his district in an enduring 
organization, of which the school is not the directing 
head hut the democratic expression, in which the 
responsibility for shaping policy and conducting 
activities falls on the parents rather than on the 
teachers, through which all currents of civic and 
neighborhood reform will naturally flow, which 
never meets to hear a formal program, but always 
to handle a vital issue, and in which the pride of 
parenthood and the duties of citizenship meet in 
an inevitable and indissoluble union. ^ 

^ Write to the" Home Education Division of the Bureau of Educa- 
tion, Washington, D. C, for a free leaflet on How to Organize and Carry 
on a Parent-Teacher Association. 



X 

SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 

The physical environment of education, the 
actual structure and surroundings of the school- 
house, the arrangement and decoration of the class- 
rooms — all these are of consequence in working 
out any new central problem in the course of study. 
Vital teaching is the essence of any schooling, but 
teaching agencies are many, and not the least potent 
are those which act indirectly and subconsciously 
upon the child, playing over his nature as silently 
and simply as the sunlight falls, forming his tastes, 
determining for him the background in which he 
will feel at home. Such forces are the home in 
which the child is bred ; the house in which he lives, 
with its idiosyncrasies of nook and corner, the turn 
of its stairs, the color of sunlight on the carpets 
in his playroom, the sound of familiar voices, cook- 
ing sights and smells, the fall and texture of his 
mother's dress, the garden scents and warmth; 
these are the fabric of which his earliest preferences 
are composed ; these make for him sooner or later 
his image of home, familiarity, and ease.^ Just as 
the child learns more from what his teacher is than 

^ See Walter Pater, The Child in the House, 
149 



150 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

from all his formal instruction, so does lie learn more 
from the actual nature of his surroundings than we 
often stop to think. And the physical environment 
of a teacher's work may hamper or facilitate her 
efforts more than even she herself will be aware. 

What scene, then, have we laid for public school- 
ing? 

The trend of school construction especially in the 
cities is toward larger and larger units of adminis- 
tration. Grade and high school buildings are now 
planned to house their hundreds, even their thou- 
sands of children ; and their solid walls rise as a sub- 
stantial tribute to the faith American democracy has 
placed in education. Centralization, economy, sys- 
tem are the watchwords of the hour. Twenty to a 
hundred teachers are brought under the direction 
of one principal. Vast throngs of children gather 
daily under one roof and move precisely to the 
sound of bells through the day's schedule of classes 
and recreation. It is inspiring to gaze across the 
common hall of a great high school at the assembly 
hour, or the playground of a grade school at recess, 
and to think of this multitude of youthful spirits 
played upon by the molding force of education. 

Yet I can never contemplate this tendency of 
school architecture and school administration to 
become more and more institutional, without certain 
mental reservations. What an enormous money 
investment these grade and high school buildings 
represent! And how difficult to scrap this costly 
plant if death sentence should some day be passed 



SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 151 

on large-scale education. Long ago, indeed, we 
awakened to the failure of large-scale institutional 
methods in the handling of delinquent, defective, 
and dependent persons. With the first interest in 
the training of subnormals and the reformation of 
criminals, came the recognition of the need for indi- 
vidual care and of the stultifying effect of mass 
management and over-organization. With a livelier 
sense of responsibility toward the dependent poor 
came the realization that old folk housed in huge 
institutional poorhouses sank rapidly to the level 
of animal senility ; and that children reared by the 
hundred in even the best and most carefully con- 
ducted orphanages lacked, when they emerged at 
last to make their own way in the world, the physical 
and intellectual vigor of the home-bred child and the 
qualities of self-dependence and initiative neces- 
sary to business success. Orphanages, poorhouses, 
penitentiaries, reformatories, insane asylums, and 
schools for the deaf, blind, dumb, and feeble-minded 
— all have long since discarded their large single 
structures for small cottages built to imitate the 
modern home. The uniform, the lock step, the 
shaved head, the big building, the big dining room, 
the big dormitory, the eternal bell — all have dis- 
appeared from our progressive penal and charitable 
institutions along with the idea that individuals 
can be handled in mass and develop valuable human 
qualities. A marvelous educational revolution has 
taken place in the plant and methods of these cor- 
rective agencies, and upon their conduct and equip- 



152 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

ment vast sums of money have been lavished. It 
has been estimated that we shall shortly spend as a 
nation and that some states do actually at present 
spend more on their wonderful scientific training 
schools for defectives in which groups are small and 
each individual receives close and sympathetic 
supervision, than on the education of those normal 
children who form the strength and bulwark of our 
country. 

Yet why should not this cottage plan, so successful 
with defectives, succeed with normal children ? We 
progress like the crab, backwards. Normal hygiene 
lags behind curative medicine. Normal education 
slowly follows afar off in the forward steps of training 
for defectives. We discovered that fresh air and 
sunlight cured tuberculosis and only afterwards that 
they are necessities of existence for the sound as 
well. And so in education, having found that an 
idiot can be taught only by the small scale method, 
perhaps it will occur to us to try the cottage plan in 
ordinary public education. If I had a small child at 
school, I should want to put him in the backward or 
tubercular division. The only reason why our nor- 
mal children have stood the wholesale factory style of 
training we have given them is that they are tough 
and strong. They survive to some extent as indi- 
vidualities in spite of the clumsy system. But how 
fruitful might the harvest be if vv-e lavished on them 
the up-to-date methods, the model cottages, and 
the individual care we now save for criminals and 
idiots ? 



SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 153 

I look forward to the time when this will be the 
case ; when even our great universities will break up, 
as they are breaking practically if not openly, into 
separate colleges with a cooperative common life; 
when the high school will be a similar group institu- 
tion ; and when the neighborhood cottage will replace 
our present caravanseries of lower learning. In 
private and experimental schools, free from the 
cramping machinery of a public system, the move- 
ment is already markedly in the way of small-scale 
education, with a manifest improvement in resulting 
personal culture. It remains for the public school 
system to take over this small basic unit and to 
link these lesser groups in large associative effort, 
thus paralleling our modern life in which the family 
exists within the city, the city in a state, the state 
within a nation, and the nation, let us hope, some 
day within a democratic world. 

To the teacher familiar with, perhaps employed 
in, and undoubtedly proud of, the orthodox and 
splendid grade school building of to-day, this may 
seem a strange, discomforting proposal. The large 
school has seemed to her, as indeed it is, a wonderful 
experiment in democracy, gathering children to- 
gether from hundreds of homes over a wide area and 
bringing into cooperation all classes of society. 
Such a teacher may assume that normal children 
from normal homes have there experienced the stim- 
ulus to individuality which we must artificially 
create by the cottage plan for our dependent or- 
phans ; and that belonging to a great common school 



154 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

is the best of all preparations for our common life. 
And there is a justice in this plea which must not be 
forgotten in the planning of any small-scale system 
of education aiming at a higher state of individual 
development. The social aim must be preserved. 
The large group-consciousness must be awakened. 
The neighborhood cottage school must be daily and 
visibly linked with other cottage schools and with 
the system as a whole. Contact, interaction, inter- 
dependence of group with group must be included 
in the scheme. 

But social life if it is to rise above the level 
of mob conduct, must be a social life of perfected 
personalities and not a blind huddling of timid, 
sheeplike intellects. There has appeared in Amer- 
ica of late a curious mob psychology in thought 
and taste, previously alien to the American spirit. 
Our independent and pioneer experience has kept 
us till to-day a nation of individuals. But now we 
begin to live in crowds. We go to school in crowds. 
We live in apartment houses, hotels, and tenements 
in crowds. We eat in restaurants in crowds. We 
dress in ready-made garments. We think in crowds 
under the guidance of the press. We even go to 
war in crowds, for the army is a crowd at its best as 
a mob is a crowd at its worst. Our life has become 
from first to last crowd life. And if this gregarious- 
ness is not to result in mob living, crowd life must be 
glorified into social life by a cultivation of individual 
personality to a point where the person will not be 
dominated by the group but will cooperate freely 



SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 155 

and creatively in its activity. Thence it is that 
for education to assume an institutional aspect; 
for mass methods, cut-and-dried courses of study, 
large classes, huge buildings, and formal classroom 
arrangement to become not only the rule but the 
ideal of our great city systems upon which the edu- 
cational development of the rest of the country will 
be modeled — this is a dangerous drifting with the 
tide, a failure of education to direct and prepare 
for life problems, duties, and responsibilities. It is 
again the resurgence of that tyranny of the average 
than which no aristocracy was ever more absolute, 
more brutish, and more unprogressive. 

Mr. Dewey has admirably pointed out that the 
typical classroom of to-day is designed for listening 
and not for doing. Desks fixed to the floor in formal 
rows, too close to permit bodily movement without 
contagious disturbance of one's neighbors, directed 
all toward a common center, the teacher's desk, 
which stands often upon a raised platform and dom- 
inates the room ; walls bare of everything that could 
interest or attract or stimulate independent trains of 
thought leading from the task in hand — here is 
an environment designed and fitted to reduce the 
student to a passive member of a listening, learning 
mob. Couple with this ground plan of the school- 
room the fact that grade classes seldom number 
less than forty, and often more than sixty, pupils, 
and the stage is set for repressive discipline and 
minimization of any original thought, liking, or act- 
ing outside of the prescribed routine. In such a 



156 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

situation, the child is not taught. The course of 
study is taught, and to stop on an individual is to 
lose the pace necessary to complete the schedule in 
the given time. To permit individual initiative is 
to introduce a disturbing leaven into the situation. 
To stimulate individual initiative is suicidal for the 
teacher. Sixty small children in one small room 
developing their own ideas, expressing them, and 
carrying them out would make a bedlam in which 
no one could think or work or have an idea of his 
own, and in which the teacher would lose all super- 
visory and directing power. Under current condi- 
tions, in the current school environment, it is a 
ease of suppress or perish both for the teacher and 
for education. Yet under current conditions in the 
current school environment, neither teacher nor edu- 
cation reaches its best efficiency. 

Some years ago while teaching in a large eastern 
school, I found my classroom rendered uninhabitable 
by the roar of riveting machines upon a steel struc- 
ture in process of erection across the street. Even 
with shut windows, recitations could progress only 
in the momentary intervals between rivets. Every 
other classroom in the building was in constant 
occupation. But finally, after desperate search, I dis- 
covered a small alcove in the gallery of the school 
chapel, fitted with a large library table and a group 
of chairs, which had been used for a teacher's study 
and for English interviews. To this alcove, I ob- 
tained permission to transport the smallest of my 
classes. Here in quiet, we sat down around the 



SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 157 

table, my only distinction consisting in an armchair 
at the head; and here we began our recitation. 
Suddenly the class became galvanized into new 
activity. Pupils who had never offered to recite 
now clamored for a hearing. Embarrassment dis- 
appeared. Personalities appeared. The amount of 
outside work voluntarily assumed by the class rose 
amazingly.. The intensity of application, the thor- 
oughness and interest of discussion, the pace of 
advance increased. The pupils became eager not 
merely to get their lesson and answer questions but 
to contribute something to the class discussions. 
One subnormal and previously failing child accom- 
plished more in this subject than many normal 
girls submerged in other classes. I myself experi- 
enced a new increase of interest in the subject and 
liking for the pupils ; and it could not but occur to me 
that the simple change from the formal rows of the 
old classroom to the round table of the chapel alcove 
had worked the miracle. At the close of the semes- 
ter, I asked to transfer to the chapel all my classes 
which could possibly be crowded around the alcove 
table; and the results were equally encouraging. 
A seemingly unimportant change in environment 
had created a new atmosphere, a contact of ideas 
and personalities, a spirit of women working to- 
gether and contributing, each in her way, to a com- 
mon end. 

Subsequent reminiscence and observation con- 
vince me that this rough experiment points the 
way to the ideal classroom of to-morrow. I look 



158 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

back with the keenest pleasures upon the Seminar 
courses which I took at college because of the in- 
formal and eager intercourse between student and 
professor around the long oaken tables of the tower 
rooms. I look back with equal pleasure upon post- 
graduate work under a professor who met his 
classes in a roomy, book-lined office with the great 
round table in the midst and its walls covered with a 
curious collection of pictures which had once con- 
tributed perhaps something to his own study or to 
class discussions. Where, as a matter of fact, do 
we find the most spontaneous, most individual, most 
constructive, and most thorough class instruction? 
In the graduate school on the one hand and the 
kindergarten on the other! At the two extremes of 
education, we adopt the free round table method of 
procedure; and why not uproot grade and high 
school pupils also from their rigid rows, why not 
turn the whole system of education into a series of 
vital human contacts, and its physical environment 
into an educative and stimulating instead of a regi- 
menting and repressing force .^^ 

The movable chairs which now more and more are 
replacing high school desks are a step in the right 
direction, though I fear they were introduced rather 
to make room for more pupils per yard of floor space 
and to accommodate the disconcerting irregularity 
in the size of pupils at the adolescent age. Many 
teachers still object to them, because they are not 
always at the same places in the room, because the 
pupils shuffle and move in them noisily, because 



SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 159 

books are always dropping from the table arm, be- 
cause, in fact, you cannot help feeling your class's 
restless young life when you give them something 
movable on which to sit. The very teacher who 
will balance through the whole recitation on one leg 
after another of his chair is often most distressed 
by class mobility. But the schoolroom does not 
exist for the peace and comfort of the teacher ; and 
movable chairs are an emancipation. They may be 
still set in rows from force of habit but they do 
not have to remain there when once the teacher 
learns the value of freedom in arrangement. It 
will undoubtedly be harder to "control"^ a class of 
twenty grouped about a table than a class of twenty 
seated at fixed desks at separate intervals under the 
roaming eye of an elevated pedagogue. But teaching 
is a calling where we ask not "is it hard.^^" but "is it 
best.'^" It is easier to use a whip than a curb, but 
who would drive a plow horse when he can sit behind 
a racer ? It is easier to steer a canoe across a sleep- 
ing lake than amid wind and wave. But he who 
can will choose the active part and find in difficulty 
his joy and his reward. A class where each child is 
reacting violently and creatively may wear a rest- 
less look disturbing to the old-line disciplinarian, but 
there is nine times out of ten more concentration 
in its slight disorder than in a stolid and seemingly 
attentive class. It is a lake broken by the wind — 
awake — alive. Control that depends on a platform 
and rigid seating has little educative value. But 

^ In the old disciplining sense of the word. 



160 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

control that grows from contact, comradeship, en- 
thusiasm, and leadership, from the creation of an 
atmosphere of culture and of beauty, from a spirit of 
fair play and cooperation, from a generous give and 
take and freedom of expression — that is a control 
which is refining, educative, and liberal. And that 
is a control which is fostered not by an environment 
giving physical superiority to the teacher, which is 
what the ordinary classroom does, but by an en- 
vironment in which her spiritual and cultural supe- 
riority is subtly emphasized, and whose atmosphere 
breathes of devotion to the higher and better things 
of life. 

How such an atmosphere can be created, we may 
now briefly hint. I have spoken of the neighbor- 
hood cottage as a possible successor to our present 
mammoth grade school structures, and of groups of 
such cottages under the direction of one super- 
visor and combining for many school activities, like 
pageants, games, and athletics, where large-scale 
cooperation can be most easily arranged. This 
neighborhood cottage could contain several rooms 
and teaching could be given by the departmental 
method now increasingly recognized as most effi- 
cient, some teachers even passing from school to 
school if this proved necessary. Every advance in 
method and equipment which is known to modern 
pedagogy could be installed in these cottages as 
easily as in a large-scale institution. Only there 
could be a great money saving in construction since 
it is the large school with its long halls, many stories. 



SCHOOLHOUSES AND CLASSROOMS 161 

and large enrollment which necessitates the massive 
and expensive fireproof buildings now in vogue. The 
cost of ground site would not be more than in the 
one story school now coming more and more into 
use in up-to-date cities. The nearness to the chil- 
dren's homes would permit friendly visiting between 
parents and teachers and safe passage of children 
from home to school. And the school itself might 
serve in architecture, furnishings, decoration, and 
landscape gardening as a model for the home life 
of the neighborhood and a center for its common 
recreation. Each school building could be equipped 
with a kitchen by way of a cooking laboratory, with 
a sewing room and linen closet, with a model bath- 
room and laundry, a library, a living room, and a 
bedroom for naps for the little children, and prac- 
tice in sweeping and dusting. The children could 
keep up the yard and plant flowers and vegetables in 
its garden, and study the bird life in its trees. In 
short, a miniature home world could be created so 
close to the home life of child and parent as to react 
sharply upon the habits and ideals of each. 

Every teacher would have control of the arrange- 
ment of her classroom and would express thereby 
her personal tastes and likings, her view of culture, 
her notions of comfort, leisure, etiquette, and behav- 
ior, and her sense of values. Each classroom would 
be the teacher's study ; her departmental library in 
the bookcases, open for the little folks to see and 
handle, her pictures on the wall, her desk in the 
corner, a library table and chairs for every one in 

M 



162 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

the midst — a place where the children came to 
breathe the atmosphere of a developed individuality 
tempered to the pursuit of some branch of liberal 
learning, which flowered into a beautiful life in beau- 
tiful surroundings. 

How to evolve the group high school is a difficult 
matter that cannot be settled in a discussion mainly 
concerned with grade school problems. Luckily 
the author wishes merely to suggest and not to work 
out in detail an ideal for grade and high schools 
which it would require long practice to perfect. 
But here lies the way of progress in public schooling ; 
and whether we take this path or proceed in our 
regimentation of education till we impose a system 
of wholesale intellectual domination upon our cit- 
izens, like that which made possible the startling 
subservience of educated Germany in this present 
War to an antiquated political idea — this will 
partly determine whether we shall lead the world 
to the new social culture of to-morrow or fall into the 
ranks behind some more liberal, personalized, and 
cultured nation. 



XI 

CONCLUSION 

In this brief and partial survey of our outstanding 
national problems and their relation to the common 
branches of grade school instruction, many things 
have been omitted which deserve consideration and 
many questions have been raised to which no satis- 
factory answer has been given. Much, too, that is 
set down in these pages is already familiar to the 
progressive and intelligent instructor. But our aim 
has been not so much to exhaust our subject as to 
point out the issues ; not so much to convey fresh 
and startling information as to group known facts 
about a new center of thought and progress. 

No one person can map out alone a program by 
which the teaching of present grade school subjects 
can be made automatically to prepare our boys and 
girls to vote intelligently on questions of public own- 
ership, supervise with alertness the officials who con- 
duct enterprises in which the public is concerned, 
and support unanimously progressive social legisla- 
tion; cooperate democratically with labor, if they 
happen to be capitalists, or deal fairly and intelli- 
gently with capital if they happen to be laborers; 
think in national terms instead of local and per- 

163 



164 SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S 

sonal ; and formulate and demand through their 
national suffrage a complete and just and workable 
program of international relations. The elabora- 
tion of such a program must be left to the united and 
patient efforts of a generation of educators. But 
such a program must be the goal toward which we 
work; and to every American teacher whose eyes 
are set on the future, who has heard the call to 
national and world democracy, and who sees that it 
is through education that we shall win at last the 
Great War whose opening chapter has been writ 
with so much precious blood — to every such Ameri- 
can teacher, this little book says " Carry On." 

The armies of our Allies are being mustered home 
again and the peace for which we long has come at 
last, but the battle for democracy is not won. Democ- 
racy is not achieved with the ending of the War; 
it has only earned the chance to be born. And 
it is the teachers of all the world who, in great city 
or isolated rural hamlet, will determine the fate of 
that ideal whose chance of trial we have bought so 
dear. If in the teaching of English and history and 
art, we can widen the vision and sympathies of our 
pupils and interest them in the civic and national 
problems that confront our citizens ; if through arith- 
metic we can lead them to see the details of the 
process by which a democracy moves step by step 
nearer to its ideals ; if through manual training we 
can create the love and habit of social service ; 
if through social play we can refine and elevate our 
common life and warm into emotional verities those 



CONCLUSION 165 

principles on which democracy is based, we as teach- 
ers will have done our bit toward finishing the task 
so heroically begun on August 4, 1914, by a little 
people who pointed the way to justice for all the 
world. 

Shall we not then as teachers study with a 
new thoroughness and intensity every aspect of 
contemporary civilization ? Shall it not be our duty 
to know the world and its currents of thought; 
to examine every proposed application of democratic 
principles to our civic life ; to reshape our instruction 
by the changing needs and issues of the day ? Shall 
we not view our calling in a new and sacred light? 
In our teachers' meetings, in our daily conversation, 
in planning day by day our class lessons and assign- 
ments, shall we not ask ourselves with a new empha- 
sis, "How well have we prepared our pupils for 
achieving the ideals for which so many brave men 
and women in so many lands have died ? " Let us 
teach so that the War will not have been fought in 
vain ; so that through lack of educative preparedness 
at least, industrial, social, political, and interna- 
tional democracy need not perish from the earth ! 



APPENDIX I 

READING ON PROBLEMS OF AMERICAN LIFE 

Culture in America : 

Canby , College Sons and College Fathers ; Harper, New York City. 
H. G. Wells, The Future in America; Harper, New York City. 
Arnold Bennett, Your United States; Harper, New York City. 
Munsterberg, American Traits; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 
Mass. 
Americans; Doubleday Page, Garden City, L. I. 
Politics : 

Ely, R. T., The World War and Leadership in a Democracy ; 

The Macmillan Co., New York City. 
Wallas, Human Nature and Politics; Macmillan and Company, 

London. 
Macy and Gannaway's Comparative Free Government; The 
Macmillan Co., New York City. 
Industry : 

Final Report of the Committee on Industrial Relations, Washing- 
ton, D. C. 
Weeks, The People's School: A Study in Vocational Training; 

Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 
Seager, Introduction to Economics; Holt, New York City. 
Ely and Wicker, Elementary Principles of Economics; The 

Macmillan Co., New York City. 
Hoxie, Trade Unionism in the United States; Appleton's, 

New York City. 
Commons and Andrews, Principles of Labor Legislation; 
Harper's, New York City. 
International Issues : 

Wister, The Pentecost of Calamity; The Macmillan Co., New 

York City. 
Usher, Pan-Germanism; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 

167 



APPENDIX II 

(a) Teaching the sentence, together with general aims and 
methods of composition work in the grades. 

Chubb, Teaching of English Composition, Chapter XI ; Mac- 
millan. New York City. 

Charters, Teaching the Common Branches; Houghton Mifflin, 
Boston, Mass. 

Canby, English Composition in Theory and Practice; Mac- 
millan Co., New York City. (A book for university 
students ; splendid to give the teacher a clear notion of 
what a sentence is and what grammatical relationships 
mean in thought.) 

Gesell, The Normal Child and Primary Education, Chapter 
XII; Ginn, Boston, Mass. 

Klapper, The Teaching of English; Appleton, New York 
City. 

Mahoney, Standards in English; World Book Co., Yonkers, 
N. Y. (A complete course of study in oral and written 
composition for elementary schools. Should not be 
slavishly followed.) 

Wilson and Wilson, The Motivation of Education, Chapter VI ; 
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 

{b) General references on grade school English. 

Arnold, Reading and How to Teach It; Silver Burdett, Bos- 
ton, Mass. 

Briggs and Coffman, Reading in the Public Schools; Row, 
Peterson & Co., Chicago. 

Chubb, The Teaching of English, Macmillan, New York City. 

Carpenter, Baker and Scott, The Teaching of English; Long- 
mans, New York City. 

168 



APPENDIX 169 

Freeman, Psychology of the Common Branches; Houghton 

Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 
Gilbert, What Children Study and Why; Silver Burdett, 

Boston, Mass. 
Hosic, The Elementary School Course in English; University 

of Chicago Press. 
Klapper, Teaching Children to Read and The Teaching of Eng- 
lish; Appleton's, New York City. (This latter contains 
excellent bibliographies at the end of each chapter.) 
Kendall and Mirick, How to Teach Fundamental Subjects; 

Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 
McMurray, Special Method in the Reading of English Classics, 
Elements of General Method, and The Method of the Reci- 
tation; Macmillan Co., New York City. 
McClintock, Literature in the Elementary School; University 

of Chicago Press, Chicago. 
Serl, Primary Language Lessons; American Book Co., New 

York City. 
Spalding, The Problem of Elementary Composition; Heath 

and Co., Boston, Mass. 
Wilson and Wilson, Motivation of School Subjects; Houghton 

Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 
See Nat. Ed. Assn. Report for 1915, p. 561, for Bibliography 

on reading tests, 
(c) Horace Mann School Reading Course for Grades One to 
Seven. (This list is given not because it seems to the author an 
ideal one to follow but since it furnishes a chart of intellectual 
capacity at the various grades, contains material that children 
are pretty sure to like, and may suggest new English sources 
to the inexperienced teacher. The list has the vice of being 
largely composed of units adapted to the single recitation hour, 
whereas it is to the author's mind highly desirable to read books 
and long stories that carry over, especially as the children grow 
older. The list is also rather limited in its inclusion of novels, 
foreign books, historical reading, or material not strictly literary 
in its nature.) 



170 APPENDIX 



FIRST GRADE 

Readers Used : 

The Riverside Primer, Child's Classics Primer, Child's Classics 

First Reader, Rhyme and Story Primer, First Readers by 

Summers, and Free and Treadwell. 
Readings : 

Stevenson : Child's Garden of Verse : The Cow, Bed in Summer, 

Windy Nights, My Shadow, The Little Land, The Land 

of Story Book, The Lamp Lighter, The Swing. 
Sherman : Little-Folk Lyrics : The Snow Bird, Song for 

Winter, Hide and Seek, Snowflakes, The Fairies' Dream. 
Celia Thaxter: March, April, Wild Geese, Little Gustava, 

Chanticleer. 
C. Rossetti : The Wind. 
Tennyson : The Throstle. 
Scott : Nature Study : Putting the World to Bed, Baby Ferns, 

Little Snow Flakes. 
Lovejoy : Nature in Verse : A Laughing Chorus, The First 

Snow Drop. 
Stories Told by Teacher : 

Grim : Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, The Musicians of 

Bremen. 
Anderson : The Discontented Pine Tree, The Ugly Duckling. 
Lang: The Green Fairy Book: The Three Pigs, The Three 

Bears, The Half Chick. The Red Fairy Book: Little 

Red Riding Hood. 
iEsop : The Dove and the Ant, The Boy and the Wolf, The 

Dog and His Shadow, The Sun and the Wind, The Lion 

and the Mouse. 
Bryant: Stories to Tell Children: The Elves and the Shoe- 
maker, The Gingerbread Man, The Hen and the Grain 

of Wheat, Another Little Red Hen. 
Richards : The Wheat Field, Pig Brother. The Child's World : 

The North Wind, Santa Claus and the Mouse, The Christ 

Child. 
Wiggin : Picciola. 



APPENDIX 171 

Harrison : Prince Harweda. 
Thompson : Raggylug. 

Blaisdell : Second Reader : Chicken Little. Graded Literature 
Readers, First Book : Three Little Goats Gruff. 

SECOND GRADE 

Readers : 

Riverside First Reader, The Progressive Road to Reading, 
Bingham's Merry Animal Tales, Second Readers by 
Hervey and Hix, Free and Treadwell, Baker and Car- 
penter, and Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, Book II, 
by Stevenson. 
Readings : 

Longfellow: Hiawatha (Selections). 

Wiley : Mewanee, the Little Indian Boy. 

Bryce : Child Lore. 

Dickinson : A Day. 

Shelley : The Cloud (Extracts). 

Field : The Night Wind, The Gingham Dog. 

Tennyson : The Owl. 

Herford : The Elf's Umbrella. 

Bunner : One, Two, Three. 

Ingelow : Seven Times Over. 

Johnson : The Lullaby of the Iroquois, Indian Cradle Song- 

Myall : Indian Mother's Lullaby. 

Arnold : The Swallows. 

Stedman : Four Winds. 

Unknown : The Open Secret. 

Lear : Nonsense Alphabet. 

Burgess : Goop Rhymes. 

Blake : The Shepherd. 

Lucas : Rhymes for Children. 

Coleridge : Up, Up, Ye Dames. 

Rossetti : Sing Song. 

Stevenson : Child's Garden of Verse. 

Sherman : Little-Folk Lyrics. 

Tabb : Child Lyrics. 



172 APPENDIX 

Stories Told : 

Bryant : The Fire Bringer, Little Tavwots, The Cat and the 
Parrot, Hans in Luck, Epaminondas and his Amelia, 
How Brother Rabbit Fooled the Whale and Mrs. Ele- 
phant, The Little Jackal and the Alligator, Billy Big and 
His Bull, Rumpelstiltskin. 

Stories from Greek Mythology : Phaethon, Mercury, Endymion, 
Latona, Baucis and Philemon. 

Bible : David and Goliath, 23d Psalm, Christmas story. 

Adaptation of the Schonberg Cotta Family. 

Defoe : Robinson Crusoe (selections) . 

Bailey and Lewis : Children's Hour: Legend of Arbutus. 

</Esop : The Crow and the Pitcher, The Hare and the Tor- 
toise, The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey. 

Richards : Short Stories : The Golden Windows, The Great 
Feast, The Hill, The Shadow, Child's Play, The Cooky, 
James' Lesson. 

Free and Treadwell : Second Reader : Hansel and Gretel, 
Peter Pan. 

THIRD GRADE 

Readers : 

Riverside Second Reader, Art Literature Reader, Book II, Third 
Readers, Aldine, and Hervey and Hix. 
Readings : 

CoUodi : Pinocchio. 

Carroll : Alice in Wonderland. 

Brown : In the Days of the Giants, Book of Saints and Friendly 
Beasts. 

Jackson : October's Bright Blue Weather, Clouds. 

Sherman : Wizzard Frost, A Real Santa Claus. 

Longfellow : The Children's Hour. 

AUingham : Fairy Folks, Wishing. 

Carey : Suppose. ? 

Field : A Sudden Shower, Little Orphant Aunie, 

Coolidge : How the Leaves Came Down, 

Moore ; The Night before Christmas. 



APPENDIX 173 

Anon. : A Wonderful Weaver. 
Rands : The Wonderful World. 
Johnston : Growing Chorus. 
Stories Told : 

Bible : The Story of Joseph. 

Greek Myths : Arachne, Prometheus, Ares. 

Anderson : Little Glaus and Big Glaus. 

Grim : Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 

Bryant : Stones to Tell Children : The Stag and the Fir Tree, 

The Golden Cobweb, The Hero of Haarlem. 
Fifty Famous Stories: The Endless Tale, The Wise Men of 

Gotham, King Alfred Stories. 
Kipling: Jungle Book: Rikki-Tiki-Tavi. 
Thompson : Lobo. 
Riley : The Bear Story. 
Harris : Uncle Remus. 
Longfellow : Hiawatha. 
yEsop : The Town Mouse and the City Mouse. 



FOURTH GRADE 

Readers : 

Riverside Third Reader, Alexander's Child Classics (3). 
Readings : 

Ruskin : King of the Golden River. 

Longfellow: Birds of Killingworth, Bell of Atri, Village 
Blacksmith. 

100th and 23d Psalm. 

Coleridge : He Prayeth Well. 

Dickenson : Out of the Morning. 

Thaxter : The Sandpiper. 

Jackson : September. 

Wordsworth : Daffodils. 

Story : The Desert. 

Kingsley : Water Babies : The River Song. 

Field : A Dutch Lullaby, A Norse Lullaby. 



174 APPENDIX 

Hogg : A Boy's Song. 
America. 
Stories Told : 

Bible : Daniel in the Lion's Den. 

Macaulay : Horatius at the Bridge. 

Homer : Wanderings of Ulysses. 

Cabot : Ethics for Children : Damon and Pythias. 

Story : The Gulf in the Forum. 

Kipling : Jungle Books: Quiquern, The White Seal. 

Harris : Uncle Remus. 

Grimm : The King of the Birds, Faithful John, The Seven 

Ravens. 
Anderson : The Brave Tin Soldier, What the Goodman Does. 
iEsop : The Crab and His Mother. 
Scott : Bruce and the Spider. 
Richards : The Patient Cat. 
Pardue and Griswold : Language thru Nature and Art : Why 

the Ears of Wheat Are Small. 

FIFTH GRADE 

Readers : 

Riverside Fourth Reader. 
Readings : 

Hawthorne : Wonderhook, Tanglewood Tales. 

Spyri : Heidi. 

24th Psalm. 

Hunt : Abou Ben Adhem. 

Holland : Heaven Is Not Reached at a Single Bound. 

Jackson : Down to Sleep. 

Tennyson : The Brook. 

Bryant : Planting the Apple Tree. 

Hemans : The Voice of Spring. 

Taylor : The Boys and the Apple Tree. 

Van Dyke : The Song Sparrow. 

Trowbridge : The Farm Yard Song. 

Emerson : The Mountain and the Squirrel. 



APPENDIX 175 

Saxe : The Blind Man and the Elephant. 
Holmes : Contentment. 
Longfellow : The Wreck of the Hesperus. 
Southey : Inchcape Rock, The Legend of Bishop Hat to. 
Whittier : Snow-Bound. 
Kipling : The Overland Mail. 
Stories Read or Told : 

Bible : David and Goliath, Jonathan, Saul. 

Pyle : King Arthur. 

Baker and Carpenter: In the Fifth Reader: Story of Roland. 

Lagerlof : Wonderful Adventures of Nils. 

Wiggin : Birds' Christmas Carol. 

Arabian Nights : Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp. 

Kipling : Just So Stories : The Cat that Walked by Himself. 

Knowles : In Child's Classics Fourth Reader : William Tell. 

Spyri : Moni the Goat Boy, The Little Runaway. 

Amici : The Finest Lesson of the Year. 

Field : The Mouse and the Mountain. 

SIXTH GRADE 

Readers : 

Riverside Fifth Reader. 
Readings : 

Scott : Ivanhoe. 

Irving : Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle. 

Longfellow : Courtship of Miles Standish, Evangeline, Skele- 
ton in Armor, King Robert of Sicily, Paul Revere's Ride. 

Browning : How They Brought the Good News, Incident of 
the French Camp, Herve Riel. 

Tennyson : Sweet and Low, The Eagle, The Revenge, Ring 
Out, Wild Bells. 

Lowell: Yusouf. 

Hemans : Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. 

Holmes : Old Ironsides. 

Scott : Lives There a Man. 

Miller : Columbus. 



176 APPENDIX 

Whitman : O Captain, My Captain. 
Percy^s Reliques : Sir Patrick Spens. 
Cunningham : A Sea Song. 
Cornwall : The Sea. 
Southy : Battle of Blenheim. 
19th Psalm. 
Stories Read or Told : 

Bible : Story of Ruth, of Moses. 

Tolstoi : Twenty Three Tales : The Three Questions. 

Isaacs : Stories from the Rabbis : The Three Boxes. 

Hawthorne : The Great Stone Face. 

Irving : Marvelous Tower. 

Tennyson : Sir Galahad. 

Pyle : Robin Hood. 

Arabian Nights: Sinbad. 

Stockton : The Griffin and the Minor Canon. 

Kipling : The Ship that Found Herself. 

SEVENTH GRADE 

Reader : 

Hyde's School Speaker and Reader. 
Readings : 

Dickens : Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son. 

Warner : Hunting the Deer. 

Burroughs : Birds and Bees, Pepacton. 

Lincoln : Gettysburg Speech. 

Webster : Patrick Henry's Speech in Virginia Convention. 

McDowell : Cora's Creed. 

121st Psalm. 

Emerson : Concord Hymn. 

Pierpont : Warren's Address. 

Kipling : Recessional, Fuzzy Wuzzy, Ballad of East and 
West. 

Byron : Destruction of Sennacherib. 

Addison : Spacious Firmament on High. 

Carmen : A Vagabond Song. 



APPENDIX 177 



Tennyson : Lady of Shalott. 
Arnold : Forsaken Merman. 
Lowell : The Vision of Sir Launfal. 
Emerson : The Snow Storm. 
Burns : Poems. 
Stories Read and Told : 
Bible : Elijah. 

Andrews : The Perfect Tribute. 
Muir : Autobiography. 
Hubbard : Message to Garcia. 
Jordan : Story of a Salmon. 
Hugo : Story of Jean Valjean. 



N 



APPENDIX III 

(a) References on methods of teaching arithmetic. 

Klapper, The Teaching of Arithmetic; Appleton, New York 

City. 

McMurray, Special Method in Arithmetic; Macmillan, New 

York City. 

Suzzallo, The Teaching of Arithmetic; Houghton Mifflin, 

Boston, Mass. 

(6) A topical summary of the various aspects of our modern 

social and industrial world which might be opened up for childish 

exploration through the gateway of arithmetic. 

1. Production. 

(a) Agriculture. 

(1) Costs. 

r cost price 

(a) Cost of land < , , \ taxes and maintenance. 

{ to rent 

(6) Cost of cultivation for various staple crops. 

^ , / hired 
Labor < , 

L- own work. 

Seed. 

Fertilizer. 

Machinery, animals, etc. 

(c) Cost of raising live stock, ditto. 

(d) Cost of transportation to markets. 
(Problems here can be under separate heads or inclusive.) 

(2) Prices. 
(Problems here can be estimates of price based on cost of pro- 
duction and handling, or of profits based on given costs and 
prices, or mere calculation such as in the grocery game.) 
(3) Resources. 

(a) Areas of agricultural land. 
178 



APPENDIX 179 

(b) Agricultural population. 

(c) Soil exhaustion and conservation. 

{d) Amount of foodstuffs and agricultural products 

consumed in United States, 
(e) Amount imported. 

(Problems to deal with bulk of production, consumption, and 
imports compared, and with rate of soil exhaustion compared 
with increase in consumption.) 

(6) Industry. 

(i\ C t / -P^^^^' machinery, labor, raw material, man- 

\ agers, advertising, marketing. 
, - _, . f Costs, 
(^)^"<=^n Profits. 

(3) Extent and variety of American industries. 

(4) Bulk of production compared with imports. 

(5) Number of persons engaged in industrial life in 

different occupations, in single factories, in dif- 
ferent departments, on different machines. 

(Problems to apply to one type of plant or to the bulk of in- 
dustrial output, and designed to illustrate complexities of in- 
dustrial life; specialization in processes; relation of material, 
interest, and labor costs to prices ; bulk and importance of manu- 
facture ; and interdependence of nation on nation for industrial 
products.) 

(c) Natural resources. 

(1) Mining. 

(2) Water. 
(8) Timber. 
(4) Air. 

(Apply to all these, problems touching extent, uses, costs of 
exploitation and replacement, and rate of exhaustion.) 

2. Consumption, 
(a) Cost of living. 

(1) Individual accounts 

(2) Family budgets. 



180 APPENDIX 

(6) Wages. 

(1) Men. 

(2) Women. 

(3) Children. 

(Problems to develop ideas of thrift and balance in expenditure 
and give a conception of a fair wage and a normal American 
standard of living. Problems can give comparative survey of 
wages in various occupations.) 

3. Transportation, 
(a) Mileage. 

(6) Rolling stock. 

z' ^ T- ffi / passenger, 
(c) lramc< » . , . 
' tireignt. 

(cZ) Labor costs. 

( \ T> ^ /passenger, 
(.) Rates (^^^.gj^^^ 

f£\ -vt nx. ^ ' f stocks and bonds, 

(/) l:'ronts to companies < a' 'A a 

(Problems to apply preferably to local railroads or street car 
systems and designed to give some idea of the difficult problems 
of fixing a fair railway rate.) 

4. Commerce. 

(a) Wholesale (costs, profits, kinds). 

(fe) Retail (ditto). 

(c) Cooperative enterprises. 

/ ^i^^s of banks, departments, investments, 
° \ profits, rates of interest. 

(Problems meant to open up the complex system of getting 
products from the farmer, miner, etc. to the manufacturer or 
retailer and then to the consumer ; and to show the social inter- 
dependence of our whole living family.) 

5. Community and national life, 
(a) Activities. 

(1) Public utilities (light, water, transportation, gas). 

(2) Paving, street cleaning, sewage, and garbage disposal. 



APPENDIX 181 

(3) Public health and hospitals. 

(4,) Fd t* / Number of schools, of pupils, of teach- 
1 ers, cost of equipment, salaries. 

(5) Police. 

(6) Defense. 

(7) Conservation. 

(Problems designed primarily to call attention to the extent 
of social and constructive activities on the part of the state.) 

(6) Income. 

' personal, 
property, 
income, 
_ indirect. 
(2) Tariffs. 

(Problems to create an understanding of the methods and 
purposes of taxation, together with discontent with our present 
chaos in the revenue system.) 



(1) Taxes < 



APPENDIX IV 

Reading for teachers who feel a deficiency in their historical 
preparation. 

West, Ancient History; AUyn & Bacon, Boston, Mass. 
Guerber, Myths of Greece and Rome; American Book Co., 

New York* City. 
Robinson, An Introduction to the History of Western Europe; 

Ginn & Co., Boston Mass. 
Adams, The Growth of the French Nation; Macmillan, New 

York City. 
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; Dutton, New York City. 
Green, Short History of the English People; Macmillan, New 

York City. 
Cheyney, Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of 

England; Macmillan, New York City. 
McLaughlin, A History of the American Nation; Appleton, 

New York City. 
Cheyney, European Background of American History; Harper 

Brothers, New York City. 
Guerber, The Book of the Epic; Lippincott, Philadelphia. 
MacMurray, Special Method in History; Macmillan, New 

York City. 
Van Tyne, Democracy's Educational Problem; Missouri 

School Journal, October, 1918. 



Printed in the United States of America. 



182 



itK.^."^ OF CONGRESS 



029 479 851 1 



